Bank robber’s cellphone gave him away; now Supreme Court hears his case

WASHINGTON– Okello Chatrie’s cell phone betrayed him.

Chatrie fled with $195,000 from the bank he robbed in suburban Richmond, Virginia, and eluded police until they turned to a powerful technological tool that erected a virtual fence and allowed him to collect the location history of cellphone users near the crime scene.

The geolocation warrant issued by police to Google revealed that Chatrie’s cell phone was one of a handful of devices near the bank at the time it was robbed.

The Supreme Court will now decide whether geolocation warrants violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches. It’s the latest high court case that is forcing justices to consider how a constitutional provision ratified in 1791 applies to technology that the nation’s founders could not have envisioned in their wildest dreams.

Chatrie’s appeal is one of two cases being argued Monday. The other is an effort by Bayer to have the court block thousands of state lawsuits alleging the global agrochemical maker failed to warn people that its popular weedkiller Roundup could cause cancer.

Geofence warrants disrupt the usual way of pursuing suspects. Typically, police identify a suspect and then obtain a warrant to search a home or phone.

With geolocation warrants, police have no suspect, only a location where a crime took place. They work backwards to identify people who were in the area.

Prosecutors credit the arrest warrants with helping solve cold cases and other crimes where surveillance cameras did not reveal suspects’ faces or license plates.

Civil liberties advocates say geofences are akin to fishing expeditions that subject many innocent people to searches of private records simply because their cellphones are near a crime. A Supreme Court ruling in favor of the technique could “spark a much broader wave of similar reverse searches,” law professors who study digital surveillance wrote to the court.

Investigators used geolocation warrants to identify supporters of President Donald Trump who attacked the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, as well as to search for the person who planted pipe bombs outside the headquarters of the Democratic and Republican parties the night before.

Police also credit the warrants with helping identify murder suspects in several states, including California, Georgia and North Carolina.

An academic group that works to bridge gaps between police and communities wrote that the court should avoid an all-or-nothing approach in Chatrie’s case.

The Trump administration’s position would allow police to use geofence warrants and similar tools “without judicial oversight or constitutional safeguards,” according to the Policing Project at New York University Law School. Chatrie’s lawyers want the court to exclude any use of geofence warrants, thereby hindering “legitimate law enforcement activities,” the group wrote.

In the case of Chatrie, the geofence warrant restarted an investigation that had stalled. After determining that Chatrie was near Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian at the time she was robbed in May 2019, police obtained a search warrant for her home. They found nearly $100,000 in cash, including bills wrapped in strips signed by the bank teller.

He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison. Chatrie’s lawyers argued on appeal that no evidence should have been used against him.

They challenged the warrant, calling it a violation of his privacy because it allowed authorities to collect the location history of people near the bank without having any evidence of their involvement in the robbery. Prosecutors argued that Chatrie had no expectation of privacy because he voluntarily agreed to Google’s location history.

A federal judge agreed that the search violated Chatrie’s rights, but allowed the evidence to be used because the officer who requested the warrant reasonably believed he was acting properly.

The federal appeals court in Richmond upheld the conviction in a fragmented ruling. In another case, the federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that geofence warrants “are blanket warrants categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment.”

In the Supreme Court’s latest case on searches in the digital age, in 2018, the court ruled 5-4 in favor of a defendant whose movements were tracked by authorities for nearly four months, without a warrant, through examination of cell tower data.

An issue in this case that also appears in Chatrie’s is whether the defendant had an expectation of privacy that would trigger Fourth Amendment protections.

The Supreme Court has already ruled that information shared with third parties cannot be considered private.

But Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion about the extraordinary computing power of cell phones, describing “seismic shifts in digital technology” and “the exhaustive chronicle of location information casually collected by cell phone carriers today.”