The U.S. Supreme Court heard a case that could rewrite the rules for obtaining digital evidence and determine whether law enforcement can turn cellphones into witnesses against suspects before investigators even know who they are seeking.
Oral arguments were held April 27, 2026, in Chatrie v. United States, a closely watched Fourth Amendment challenge that tests the boundaries of so-called “geofence” warrants. Geofence warrants allow police to capture location data from cellphones in a particular geographic area and during a specific time period.
A decision limiting such warrants could allow criminal defense lawyers greater leverage to confront law enforcement over the scope of digital investigations. If the court takes a more permissive approach, police may have more leeway to use location data as an investigative tool.
Counsel for the tech industry have weighed in as well, concerned about the growing barrage of warrants and requests from law enforcement for user data on company servers. As Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law expert and dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, recently wrote, “The case raises a host of important issues concerning the application of the Fourth Amendment to new technology.”
A Robbery Near Richmond
According to court filings, ten minutes before closing time on May 20, 2019, cameras at the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Va. recorded a man entering the institution holding a cellphone to his face. The man put the phone away, approached a teller, and handed her a note demanding cash. Moments later, he brandished a gun, ordered the manager to open the credit union’s safe, and then fled with a bag containing $195,000.
With no promising leads in the weeks following the robbery, police focused on the camera footage and cellphone. The detective leading the case obtained a warrant directed at Google that asked for the location histories of any cellphones near the credit union around the time of the robbery.
In response, Google provided anonymized information about 19 accounts linked to devices in that area at that time. Without seeking an additional warrant, the detective then asked Google to provide anonymized location data for a longer time period and wider geographic area on nine accounts. The company complied. And after reviewing the data, the detective returned again, sans warrant, requesting and receiving usernames and email addresses for three accounts.
One of the user accounts belonged to Okello Chatrie of nearby Richmond, Va. A search of his residence yielded demand notes like the one handed to the teller, nearly $100,000 in cash, and a pistol matching the description of the one used in the robbery.
Challenging the Warrant
At trial, Chatrie’s lawyers argued to suppress evidence collected as a result of the geofence warrant on the grounds that it violated their client’s constitutional rights. The Fourth Amendment protects individuals from unreasonable searches and seizures and specifies that “warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
A judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that the warrant had indeed violated the Fourth Amendment by lacking “any semblance of … particularized probable cause” and “improperly provided law enforcement and Google with unbridled discretion to decide which accounts will be subject to further intrusions.”
He allowed the warrant to stand, however, citing the “good faith” exception, which allows evidence obtained through an unconstitutional search if law enforcement reasonably believed the warrant was legal. Chatrie eventually pleaded guilty, reserving the right to appeal the geofence warrant. He was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison.
The Question Before Justices
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled 2-1 that the geofencing effort did not constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment because users voluntarily opt in to data collection by tech companies. In an en banc rehearing, the full Fourth Circuit divided, with seven judges saying the warrant constituted a search and seven saying it did not.
Chatrie appealed to the Supreme Court, asking justices to decide whether the geofence warrant violated the Fourth Amendment and if the good faith exception should apply. The court agreed to review the warrant’s constitutionality but declined to take up the good faith exception.
In their petition to the court, attorneys from Jenner & Block and the federal public defender’s office in Virginia’s eastern district argued that the warrant was issued with no probable cause. The resulting search also lacked specificity, they said, noting the multiple requests for information that occurred without an additional warrant. Lawyers from the U.S. Department of Justice applied the same argument that swayed many of the members of the court of appeals—that the Fourth Amendment does not apply when information is voluntarily supplied by a user to a third-party.
Both arguments turn on interpretations of 2018’s Carpenter v. U.S., a decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. that found the government needs a warrant to collect cell tower information. While the Carpenter decision limited the third-party doctrine, it did not apply broadly to location data collected by phones and other devices.
Chatrie’s lawyers argue that the technology in their case is even more precise and invasive than the cell tower information at issue in Carpenter. The government contends Carpenter does not apply. While a cell tower automatically gathers information without user consent, Chatrie gave his permission for location data collection by the phone and its apps, the DOJ argues.
A Divided Court?
At oral arguments, justices appeared divided on the question of the warrant’s constitutionality.
Roberts asserted that if users do not want the government to know their location history, “you just flip that off. You don't have to have that feature on your phone. So what’s the problem?” Yet he also asked, “what's to prevent the government from using this to find out the identities of everybody at a particular church, a particular political organization?”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed to the trial judge’s decision, which found that Chatrie had not necessarily agreed to share his location and noted that it may be “very hard and if not opaque to figure out” how to turn off location sharing. And Justice Neil Gorsuch asked if a decision for the government might open the door to warrantless searches of other private digital files, such as email, photos, and documents.
Justices Samuel Alito and Amy Coney Barrett appeared less open to privacy arguments. “This was a few hours, and it was a public location,” Barrett said. “And nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy in their public observable movement.”
Scotusblog, in an analysis of the arguments, said that some of the justices “seemed to advocate for a relatively narrow ruling that would clarify what such warrants require, even if it does not ultimately resolve all of the thorny issues potentially raised by the case.”
Tech Companies Weigh In
Alito also questioned why the court was taking up the case, because Google—which was receiving thousands of warrants annually from law enforcement—has since changed its technology to remove location histories from its servers and transferring them to individual users’ devices. He said the court would essentially be writing “law review articles on this fascinating subject.”
Adam Unikowsky, the Jenner & Block partner arguing for Chatrie, responded that the issue was critical because “lots of providers store data, not just Google.” In his article, Chemerinsky noted the “host of new technologies that police use to obtain information about individuals.” He added that “the court’s decision…could provide much-needed guidance as to how the Fourth Amendment should be applied to new technology used by police to gather information about individuals.”
Tech companies like Google and Microsoft have weighed in with amicus briefs urging the court to clarify the rules and to require warrants. Google’s brief, submitted by lawyers at Lehotsky Keller Cohn, said data stored on its servers may “reveal the most intimate details of a person’s life…These documents are therefore not ordinary business records maintained by a third party that happen to concern an individual; they are the user’s personal records.”
Microsoft, in an amicus brief submitted by lawyers at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr, said that “directing technology providers to hunt for a needle in a haystack of user data has obvious appeal for law enforcement” but the “tactic will endanger users’ privacy interests and threaten to embroil technology companies in determinations about whether the government has requested an appropriately narrow amount of information.”
What In-House Teams Can Do
For in-house counsel, Chatrie may serve as an impetus for serious internal discussions about users’ location data and other personal digital material. Does the company, for instance, have an action plan in place about how it will respond to law enforcement requests to hand over data?
Before the government asks, companies may wish to audit their data collection and retention practices and examine when data is captured, where it goes, and the length of time it is stored. Counsel would also do well to familiarize their legal and technology teams with shifting requirements at the state and federal levels and to create explicit protocols for determining when a request exceeds what the law may allow.
A tech company storing location history information on its own servers might also take a page from Google and move information to individual devices. And it may also update its privacy disclosures to ensure users are aware of how it will react if it receives a geofencing warrant or other government demand for information.
The court’s decision in the Chatrie case is expected by the end of its term on June 30.
---
David L. Brown is a legal affairs writer and consultant, who has served as head of editorial at ALM Media, editor-in-chief of The National Law Journal and Legal Times, and executive editor of The American Lawyer. He consults on thought leadership strategy and creates in-depth content for legal industry clients and works closely with Best Law Firms as senior content consultant.