Fourth Circuit Upholds Geofence Warrant, but Can’t Agree Why (1)

The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld a lower court ruling Wednesday in a Fourth Amendment case allowing the government to use mobile-device data it obtained from Google Inc. to prosecute a bank robbery, but the court’s 15 judges couldn’t produce a majority opinion explaining why.

The court sitting en banc ruled 14-1 in favor of affirming the lower court ruling, which allowed information from a so-called geofence warrant to be used to prosecute of Okello Chatrie for the robbery, but it issued eight separate opinions concurring in the result in addition to a dissenting opinion.

At issue in the overlapping and `conflicting opinions was how broadly the court should rule, whether the government’s actions constituted a “search” under the Fourth Amendment, and whether the defendant had a reasonable expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turned over to third parties.

A geofence warrant typically seeks information for all users of mobile devices within a geographic area during a particular period in time. The Fifth Circuit in August 2024 ruled that geofence warrants are a form of general warrant that is categorically banned under the Fourth Amendment.

Chatrie pleaded guilty in 2022 to robbing a bank after the evidence was allowed but later challenged the lower court’s denial of his motion to suppress the location data.

A divided three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit upheld the lower court ruling in July 2024, with Judge Julius N. Richardson writing for the court that the government’s actions didn’t constitute a Fourth Amendment “search” because Chatrie had voluntarily exposed his data. Judge James A. Wynn argued in dissent that the panel analysis was based on a misreading of a crucial Supreme Court precedent, Carpenter v. United States.

The high court ruled in that case that the government must obtain a search warrant before obtaining cell-site information records covering more than seven days.

The Eleventh Circuit also recently rejected a criminal defendant’s challenge to information obtained through a geofence warrant, holding that the warrant in that case didn’t violate the defendant’s reasonable expectation of privacy.

The Fourth Circuit decided in November 2024 to rehear Chatrie’s appeal en banc.

Good Faith Exception

All 14 of the judges voting to affirm the lower court agreed that the evidence from the geofence warrant could come in under the good faith exception to the Fourth Amendment, which preserves otherwise inadmissible evidence from suppression where law enforcement acted in good faith.

This was the district court’s reason for admitting the evidence, and it was all that was needed to resolve the case, Chief Judge Albert Diaz said in his concurring opinion.

But other judges went beyond Diaz to stake out positions on the underlying substantive issues in the case.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III and four other judges argued that no warrant was even required to obtain the evidence because the police conduct didn’t constitute a Fourth Amendment search where the information at issue had been voluntarily provided to Google by Chatrie.

But Wynn and five other judges took the opposite tack on that issue, arguing that law enforcement’s obtaining of mobile-device data was a Fourth Amendment search requiring a warrant.

Wynn took particular issue with the argument that the police conduct was shielded by Chatrie’s allegedly voluntary disclosure of his location data to Google. Based on the Supreme Court’s analysis of similar investigative techniques in Carpenter v. United States, the government invaded his reasonable expectation of privacy by obtaining his data, Wynn said.

Judge Roger Gregory argued in dissent that the information should be suppressed and that the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment in giving law enforcement permission to obtain a “seemingly unlimited amount of data” without sufficient judicial oversight.

“The police officer involved in the search could not have reasonably believed that the liberty authorized by the warrant was constitutional given the lack of specificity the Fourth Amendment explicitly demands,” he said.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Office of the Federal Public Defender represent Chatrie.

The case is US v. Chatrie, 4th Cir. en banc, No. 22-04489, 4/30/25.