US Supreme Court Agrees to Hear Challenge to Geofence Warrant (1)

The US Supreme Court agreed Friday to review the constitutionality of court orders that compel tech companies such as Google to provide anonymized user location data to law enforcement.

Unlike typical warrants, geofence warrants don’t identify specific individuals or suspects to be searched. Rather, they seek data to enable law enforcement to identify potential suspects based on who was in a particular area at a given time.

While use of geofence warrants has proliferated over the last decade, state and federal courts disagree about how they ought to be treated.

The high court’s decision to grant certification in the case is a “really big deal,” said Elisha Kobre, a former federal prosecutor and partner at Sheppard Mullin.

The warrants are often used in cases involving serious, sometimes violent offenses: armed robbery, murder, sexual assaults, and so forth.

“It’s a very powerful tool, and there isn’t a ton of precedent for deciding this case,” he said.

The case deals with the difficulty of addressing evolving technology.

Advancements in technology have made much of existing Fourth Amendment law obsolete, said Susan Lin, a criminal defense attorney with Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg, & Lin LLP.

“Privacy has to be viewed differently now, simply because of how much technology is necessary to functioning in society,” she said.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and two state high courts have allowed geofence warrants, while the Fifth Circuit has said they violate the constitution.

The petition was brought by Okello Chatrie, who was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment after his conviction for the armed robbery of a Credit Union in Midlothian, Va.

He argues that Google location data obtained by law enforcement using a geofence warrant should have been suppressed at his trial. Geofence warrants don’t satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement, and even if the warrant here was somehow constitutional, its execution wasn’t, he claims. He also says the good faith exception shouldn’t apply to general warrants that may authorize the search of millions of accounts without probable cause.

A divided Fourth Circuit panel concluded that because Chatrie voluntarily exposed his location information to Google, the government hadn’t conducted a Fourth Amendment search. On rehearing en banc, the full court affirmed but judges issued eight concurring opinions and one dissent.

But the so-called third-party doctrine—the idea that an individual lacks a reasonable expectation of privacy when they’ve voluntarily disclosed that information to third parties—might be an out of date way to think about the Fourth Amendment analysis, Lin said.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained why in her concurrence in United States v. Jones, a 2012 high court case dealing with the constitutionality of GPS monitoring.

The approach “is ill-suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks,” the justice said.

In opposing Chatrie’s petition, the government endorsed the conclusion that he relinquished any privacy right in his location information by opting to share the cellphone location information with a third party. And even if the government’s request for geofencing information was a search, law enforcement obtained “a valid and non-general warrant based on probable cause,” the government’s filing said.

Driving the federal circuit split, the Fifth Circuit said in United States v. Smith that collecting location history is a search and that geofence warrants are unconstitutional because they fail to meet the Fourth Amendment’s particularity requirement. But it said suppression wasn’t necessary because law enforcement acted in good faith.

The high court denied review of that case in November.

The issue has also created state-federal splits. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals—the court of last resort for criminal matters in the state—and the Georgia Supreme Court have rejected the Fifth Circuit’s reasoning.

Chatrie is represented by Jenner & Block LLP and the Office of the Federal Public Defender for the Eastern District of Virginia.

The case is United States v. Chatrie, U.S., No. 25-112, review granted 1/16/26.