Chatrie v. United States (No. 25-112) is a United States Supreme Court case holding that a geofence warrant is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Chatrie reaffirmed and expanded the Court's holding in the landmark 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, which held that government entities violate the Fourth Amendment when accessing historical cell site location information (CSLI) records containing the physical locations of cellphones without a search warrant.
Background A geofence warrant is a law enforcement technique used to identify all cell phones present within a physical area at a particular time and is a form of reverse search. The warrant makes use of technology companies' practice of collecting granular user location information. The law enforcement agency seeking the warrant directs it toward a technology company, and identifies a geofence (a virtual "fence" around a geographic location) along with a specific period of time to be searched.
Before the 2018 Supreme Court case Carpenter v. United States, third-party data was not protected by the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirement under a legal theory known as the third-party doctrine. Carpenter created a narrow exception to the third-party doctrine for cell site location information (CSLI), a particular type of location data collected by wireless carriers when a phone connects to a cell tower. While CSLI can provide precise location information in places with many cell towers close together, geofence data is generally far more precise. CSLI can show where a cell phone is physically present within a range as small as one-eighth of a mile, whereas geofence data provides a range of twenty meters. Unlike CSLI, geofence data uses GPS pings, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections. The warrants at issue in Chatrie and Carpenter also differed in duration of time. In Carpenter, the government sought access to over 12,898 data points spanning 129, whereas the Chatrie geofence warrant covered 2 hours worth of location information.
Lower court history
On May 20, 2019, a bank was robbed in Midlothian, Virginia. Over the coming weeks, the investigation stalled. On June 14, local law enforcement applied for and received a geofence warrant directed at Google. The issued warrant authorized a "geofence" area in the form of a circle targeted the bank with a radius of 150 meters. The area encompassed was large enough to collect information from a nearby church.
The government worked with Google to create a three-step process for responding to such warrants. First, the warrant requested anonymized information on all user accounts within the geofence between 4:20pm and 5:20pm on the day of the robbery. Second, after reviewing such information, law enforcement would attempt to narrow down their list of possible suspects. They would then return to Google and seek all information on users from the narrowed list, between 3:50pm and 5:50pm (for an additional 30 minutes on each end of the original time period) regardless of whether they were inside or outside of the geofence area. Finally, after reviewing the second batch of information, law enforcement would again narrow the list of persons of interest and return to Google, at which point the remaining accounts would be linked to identifiable users. Police received the name, phone numbers, and email addresses of all users identified in the final step of the warrant procedure.
Detective Joshua Hylton sent the geofence warrant to Google, which executed the first step of the process. In doing so, it returned anonymized data for 19 users within the geofence. Hylton subsequently narrowed the request to nine users and requested an extra hour of location data, unbounded by the geofence. Lastly, he narrowed the request to three users and requested de-anonymized information on them, which Google supplied. Okello Chatrie was among the three final users.
Chatrie was indicted in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia on robbery and firearms charges. He moved to suppress the results of the geofence warrant. After extensive fact-finding, the district court declined to suppress the results of the warrant. Despite finding both that a search occurred and the warrant violated the particularity and probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment, the court found that the evidence was nevertheless admissible under the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule and denied the motion. Chatrie entered a conditional plea of guilty, reserving his right to appeal the denial of his motion to suppress.
Court of Appeals A divided panel of the Fourth Circuit affirmed Okello Chatrie's conviction. Dissenting, Judge James Andrew Wynn concluded that the government violated Chatrie's reasonable expectation of privacy. On rehearing en banc, the Fourth Circuit affirmed the district court's judgment in a one-sentence per curiam opinion.United States v. Chatrie, 107 F. 4th 319 (4th Cir. 2024).
The 15–member court divided 7–7 on whether a Fourth Amendment search had occurred, with Chief Judge Albert Diaz not expressing a view either way. Seven judges concluded, in an opinion written by Judge Julius N. Richardson, that no Fourth Amendment search occurred because petitioner lacked a "reasonable expectation of privacy in two hours' worth of Location History data voluntarily exposed to Google," with three judges within that group (J. Harvie Wilkinson III, Paul V. Niemeyer, and Robert Bruce King) filing separate concurrences. Seven judges, in an opinion written by Judge Wynn, concluded that a Fourth Amendment search had occurred, reasoning that the government had "invaded [petitioner's] reasonable expectation of privacy" in accessing his data, an expectation that the third-party doctrine was “wholly inadequate” to defeat. Of the seven judges who found a Fourth Amendment search, five concluded that the government's warrant application was not supported by probable cause, with two not opining on the issue. However, only Judge Roger Gregory would have suppressed the evidence, the other six indicating that suppression was unwarranted under the good-faith exception.United States v. Chatrie, 136 F. 4th 100 (4th Cir. 2025) (en banc).
Supreme Court
On July 28, 2025, Chatrie petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari. On January 16, 2026, the court granted review. Oral arguments were heard on April 27, 2026. The case was argued by Adam Unikowsky on behalf of Chatrie and Eric Feigin on behalf of the United States.
On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court held that the police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they obtained Chatrie's location information from Google because individuals have reasonable expectations of privacy in their cell phone location information.Chatrie v. United States, 609 U.S. ___ (2026) The court did not hold that geofence warrants are unconstitutional, but did hold that a search occurs when law enforcement accesses location data from an individual's cell phone. Because such access constitutes a search, the Fourth Amendment requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant prior to demanding it from technology companies regardless of the duration of information sought. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson concurred in the judgment, but would have gone further by deeming the geofence warrant at issue invalid because it failed to meet the particularity and probable cause requirements for warrants. The court remanded the case to the Fourth Circuit for determination of the warrant issue.
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