The justices ruled that police searches of cellphone location data implicate privacy rights, but left unresolved whether evidence in the bank robbery case should be suppressed.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled June 29 that law enforcement agencies must comply with the Fourth Amendment when using cellphone location data gathered through geofence warrants to investigate crimes.
The 6-3 decision came in a case involving a suspected bank robber who argued that police violated his constitutional rights when they used cellphone location data to connect him to a robbery scene.
The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan said individuals have a privacy interest in cellphone location records, even when the data is held by a third-party technology company and covers only a limited period.
“An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information—even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company,” Kagan wrote.
The ruling did not end the criminal case against the defendant, Okello Chatrie. Instead, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the Court of Appeals to determine whether the warrant used by police was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.
“We leave to the Court of Appeals the further question whether, given the warrant issued, the search here was reasonable, meaning that each of its steps was properly described with particularity and found to be supported by probable cause,” Kagan wrote.
The case stemmed from a 2019 bank robbery in Midlothian, Virginia. After the robbery, police served Google with a geofence warrant seeking anonymous cellphone user data from within a 300-meter radius of the crime scene.
Investigators used the location data to narrow a list of possible suspects. They eventually identified Chatrie, arrested him and charged him in connection with the robbery.
A district court allowed the location data to be used as evidence. Chatrie then entered a conditional guilty plea, preserving his right to challenge the use of the data on appeal.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the warrant, but the judges were divided over major legal questions, including whether reviewing geofence location data qualifies as a search under the Fourth Amendment.
The Supreme Court majority ruled that it does, finding that Chatrie had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the cellphone location data.
Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed with parts of the majority’s reasoning but wrote separately to question whether the privacy framework fully explained the issue.
“Count me unpersuaded,” Gorsuch wrote. “Why does tracking Mr. Chatrie’s movements digitally over an hour or two invade his reasonable expectation of privacy when an officer tailing him for the same length of time would not?”
Gorsuch argued that the location data should instead be understood as Chatrie’s personal property.
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett dissented.
Alito argued in dissent that Chatrie’s chances of having the evidence suppressed are “virtually zero” and said the Supreme Court should not have taken the case.
The lower courts were also split over whether the “good faith” exception applied. That exception generally allows evidence to be used when officers reasonably believed they were acting lawfully, even if a warrant is later found to have been improperly issued.
The Supreme Court did not resolve that question. Alito criticized the majority for leaving the issue open.
“Although today’s decision will send seismic waves through our Fourth Amendment doctrine, not one iota of the majority opinion will affect the outcome of this case. The Court knows this and does not claim otherwise,” Alito wrote.
The ruling establishes that geofence warrants involving cellphone location data trigger Fourth Amendment scrutiny, while leaving key questions for lower courts about how such warrants must be drafted and whether evidence obtained through them may still be used under the good faith exception.
The decision is likely to affect future investigations involving location data collected from technology companies, particularly in cases where police seek information about all devices present near a crime scene rather than data tied to a known suspect.
Original article
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