The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to weigh arguments for and against using geofence warrants while investigating criminal cases. Photo by the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office/Wikimedia Commons
Jan. 16 (UPI) — The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to review a challenge to geofence warrants filed by a man who was convicted of robbing a bank in 2019.
Okello Chatrie was convicted of robbing $195,000 from a Virginia bank on May 20, 2019, after investigators used location-tracking data from Google to identify him.
Google provided a geofence that records and stores location data within a certain radius of the bank that Chatrie robbed at gunpoint.
A detective obtained three warrants for related geofence data, which Google provided after receiving the respective warrants.
The geofence data tracked the movements of the cellphone carried by Chatrie when he robbed the bank and afterward and recorded the respective longitudes and latitudes of the phone’s location at different times.
Chatrie challenged the use of the geofence data in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, saying it violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure and violated his reasonable expectation of privacy.
The location data was a key piece of evidence against him, but Chatrie said he did not voluntarily provide the information to investigators, and they had no probable cause to seek a warrant for the geofence data.
The Fourth Circuit in April ruled against Chatrie, saying he voluntarily provided the location data to Google, which in turn provided it to law enforcement when presented with warrants to do so.
An earlier ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in a separate case reached an opposite conclusion, saying geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment, but the evidence presented is still valid because law enforcement in that case acted in good faith.
While both appellate court rulings ultimately reach the same conclusion that the evidence is valid in the respective cases, the matter of whether or not geofence warrants are constitutional remains to be decided.
The Supreme Court justices agreed to render a decision during the current session that ends in the fall.