WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court will hear arguments starting at 10 a.m. EDT on whether geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches. The case stems from the prosecution of Okello Chatrie, who was identified as a suspect in a Virginia bank robbery through a warrant served on Google for the location history of cellphone users near the crime scene.

Chatrie made off with $195,000 from a bank he robbed in suburban Richmond and eluded police until they used a technological tool that erected a virtual fence and allowed them to collect the location history of nearby cellphone users. The geofence warrant served on Google found that Chatrie's cellphone was among a handful of devices in the vicinity of the bank around the time it was robbed.

After determining that Chatrie was near the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian around the time it was robbed in May 2019, police obtained a search warrant for his home and found nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in bands signed by the bank teller. Chatrie pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.

Chatrie's lawyers argued on appeal that none of the evidence obtained through the geofence warrant should have been used against him because it violated his privacy by allowing authorities to gather location history without evidence of wrongdoing. Prosecutors argued that Chatrie had no expectation of privacy because he voluntarily opted into Google's location history.

A federal judge ruled that the geofence search violated Chatrie's Fourth Amendment rights but allowed the evidence to be used because the officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly. The federal appeals court in Richmond upheld the conviction in a fractured ruling. In a separate case, the federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that geofence warrants are general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.

Geofence warrants reverse the usual process by identifying people in a crime area without first identifying a suspect. Prosecutors credit them with helping crack cold cases and other crimes where surveillance cameras did not reveal suspects' faces or license plates, and police credit the tool with helping identify suspects in killings in California, Georgia and North Carolina. Civil libertarians say that geofence warrants subject many innocent people to searches of private records because their cellphones were in the vicinity of a crime. Investigators also used geofence warrants to identify supporters of President Donald Trump who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and in the search for the person who planted pipe bombs outside the Democratic and Republican party headquarters the night before.

According to the Policing Project at the New York University School of Law, the Trump administration's position would allow police to use geofence warrants and similar tools with no judicial supervision or constitutional safeguards. The Supreme Court has previously ruled that information shared with third parties cannot be considered private. In 2018, the court divided 5-4 in favor of a defendant whose movements were tracked by authorities without a warrant for nearly four months through cellphone tower data. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion about "seismic shifts in digital technology" and "the exhaustive chronicle of location information casually collected by wireless carriers today."