The Supreme Court on Monday seemed inclined to rule that police could use geofence warrants that collect the location history of cellphone users to find people near crime scenes.
The justices heard nearly two hours of arguments in an appeal from Okello Chatrie, who pleaded guilty to robbing a bank in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia.
Chatrie eluded the police until they turned to the geofence warrant, a powerful technological tool that erected a virtual fence and allowed them to locate cellphones that were near the bank around the time it was robbed in May 2019.
The justices did not appear to embrace arguments offered by Adam Unikowsky, Chatrie’s lawyer, that geofence warrants are too general to comply with the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the warrant that led to Chatrie’s identification as a suspect did not seem to be general. “This isn’t that. It identifies a place, a crime, a timeframe,” Sotomayor said.
The federal appeals court in Richmond upheld Chatrie’s 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.”
The case is the court’s latest contemplation of how a constitutional provision ratified in 1791 applies to technology the nation’s founders count not have envisioned.
The justices seemed eager to avoid a broad ruling. They could limit the time and geographic area covered by such warrants, and they might even decline to say whether what police did in Chatrie’s case even amounted to a search that requires a warrant.
Instead the court might rule that, assuming a warrant is required, police can constitutionally conduct geofence searches.
A ruling for Chatrie, who is serving a prison term of nearly 12 years, might not ultimately help him. Even the federal judge who ruled that the search violated Chatrie’s rights allowed the evidence to be used because the officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly.
