Supreme Court seems inclined to allow police to use geofence warrants to identify criminal suspects
WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court On Monday he seemed inclined to decide that police could use geographical border guarantees Collecting location history of mobile phone users to find people near crime scenes.
The justices heard nearly two hours of arguments in the appeal of Okello Chatrie, who pleaded guilty to robbing a bank in a suburb of Richmond, Virginia.
Chatrie evaded police until they erected a virtual fence and used a geofencing warrant, a powerful technological tool that allowed them to locate cellphones located near the bank around the time it was robbed in May 2019.
The justices did not appear to embrace arguments by Chatrie’s attorney, Adam Unikowsky, that geofence warrants were too general to comply with the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the arrest warrant that led to Chatrie’s identification as a suspect did not appear to be general. “This is not that. It describes a place, a crime, a period of time,” Sotomayor said.
The federal appeals court in Richmond upheld Chatrie’s conviction in a fragmented decision. In a separate case, the federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that geofence permits “are general warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.”
The case is the court’s latest consideration of how a constitutional provision approved in 1791 applies to technology that the nation’s founders did not envision.
The justices appeared eager to avoid a broad ruling. They may limit the time period and geographic area covered by such warrants, and may even refuse to say whether what police did in the Chatrie case amounted to a search requiring a warrant.
Instead, the court may rule that police can constitutionally conduct geofencing searches, assuming a warrant is necessary.
The decision given to Chatrie, who is serving a nearly 12-year prison sentence, may not ultimately benefit him. Even the federal judge who ruled that the search violated Chatrie’s rights allowed the evidence to be used because the police officer who applied for the warrant reasonably believed that he had acted appropriately.
