A bank robber stole $195,000 and was apprehended after his phone triggered a geofence alert. The Supreme Court will now rule on whether this constituted a Fourth Amendment violation.

(SeaPRwire) –   Okello Chatrie was ultimately undone by his own mobile phone.

After stealing $195,000 from a bank in a Richmond, Virginia suburb, Chatrie managed to evade law enforcement until investigators utilized a sophisticated digital tool. This technology created a virtual perimeter, enabling police to pull location data for all mobile devices present near the crime scene.

Through a geofence warrant served to Google, authorities discovered that Chatrie’s phone was among a small group of devices located near the bank at the time of the robbery.

The Supreme Court is now set to determine if these geofence warrants infringe upon the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches. This case represents the latest instance where the justices must reconcile a constitutional amendment written in 1791 with modern technologies that the nation’s founders could never have envisioned.

Chatrie’s appeal is one of two matters scheduled for argument on Monday. The other involves a petition from Bayer, which is seeking to block numerous state-level lawsuits claiming the company failed to adequately warn consumers that its Roundup herbicide could be carcinogenic.

Geofence warrants effectively reverse the standard investigative process. Typically, police identify a suspect first and then secure a warrant to search their property or devices.

With geofence warrants, police begin without a suspect, focusing instead on the location of the crime. They work backward to identify individuals who were present in that area.

Prosecutors argue that these warrants are essential for solving cold cases and other crimes where surveillance footage fails to capture a suspect’s face or vehicle information.

Conversely, civil liberties advocates contend that geofences function as “fishing expeditions,” subjecting innocent people to privacy intrusions simply because their phones were near a crime scene. Legal scholars specializing in digital surveillance have warned the court that ruling in favor of this practice could trigger a widespread surge in similar reverse-search tactics.

Investigators have previously employed geofence warrants to identify participants in the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, as well as to track the individual responsible for placing pipe bombs near political party headquarters the preceding night.

Law enforcement also credits these warrants with helping identify suspects in homicide investigations across states such as California, Georgia, and North Carolina.

An academic organization focused on improving police-community relations has urged the court to avoid an “all-or-nothing” ruling in the Chatrie case.

According to the Policing Project at NYU School of Law, the Trump administration’s stance would permit the use of geofence tools “without judicial oversight or constitutional safeguards.” Meanwhile, Chatrie’s legal team is pushing for a total ban on geofence warrants, a move the group argues would hinder “legitimate law enforcement activities.”

In Chatrie’s case, the geofence warrant provided the breakthrough needed to revive a stalled investigation. After confirming Chatrie was near the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian during the May 2019 robbery, police secured a warrant for his residence. They recovered nearly $100,000 in cash, including currency bands marked by the bank teller.

Chatrie pleaded guilty and received a sentence of nearly 12 years. On appeal, his attorneys argued that the evidence obtained via the warrant should have been suppressed.

They challenged the warrant as a privacy violation, noting that it allowed the government to collect location data on individuals near the bank without any evidence linking them to the crime. Prosecutors countered that Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy because he had opted into Google’s location history tracking.

While a federal judge acknowledged that the search infringed on Chatrie’s rights, the evidence was admitted because the officer who requested the warrant acted under a good-faith belief that the procedure was lawful.

The federal appeals court in Richmond upheld the conviction in a split decision. Conversely, the federal appeals court in New Orleans has previously declared that geofence warrants constitute “general warrants” that are categorically forbidden by the Fourth Amendment.

In its most recent ruling on digital-era searches in 2018, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision in favor of a defendant whose movements were tracked for four months via cellphone tower data without a warrant.

A central question in that case, which also applies to Chatrie’s, is whether the defendant held an expectation of privacy sufficient to invoke Fourth Amendment protections.

The Supreme Court has historically held that information shared with third parties is not entitled to privacy protections.

However, in his 2018 majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts highlighted the immense power of modern mobile devices, noting the “seismic shifts in digital technology” and the “exhaustive chronicle of location information” routinely gathered by wireless providers today.