Posted by Last week, the Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari in Chatrie v. United States. The issue is this: Whether the execution of a geofence warrant violated the Fourth Amendment. You’ll find the cert petition here and the reply brief here. For more content on the case, check out of the Chatrie page on SCOTUSblog.
Our FPD friend (and technology savant), Kyana Givens, wrote a (very) helpful reaction piece, and here it is:
WHAT’S AT STAKE
Geofence warrants. Law enforcement submits a location and time frame to a tech company, and the company identifies every single user whose device pinged in that area. No suspect, no probable cause as to any individual, just a digital dragnet. A data vacuum. The reply brief doesn’t mince words: this is “the most important Fourth Amendment issue of this generation.”
THE CIRCUIT MESS
The Fifth Circuit (Smith) says geofence warrants are categorically unconstitutional general warrants. The Fourth Circuit fractured into multiple opinions and couldn’t agree on much of anything. State courts in Texas, Georgia (!), and Colorado are all over the map. Magistrate judges have no clear guidance. Neither do law enforcement agencies or the tech companies responding to these requests.
WHAT THE GOVERNMENT IS SELLING
- The split doesn’t matter because good-faith saves the evidence anyway
- Google changed its policies, so this is all going away
- Users opted into Location History—third-party doctrine applies
- The issue is too fact-bound for certiorari review
- Chatrie waived his best arguments
WHAT CHATRIE IS ACTUALLY SAYING
- Smith is now binding law in the Fifth Circuit—magistrates must deny these warrants going forward
- Google isn’t the only game in town; Apple, Uber, Lyft, Snapchat, X, Microsoft, and cell carriers all hold similar data
- Reverse keyword warrants and tower dumps raise the exact same problems
- You can’t use the good-faith exception to permanently immunize an entire category of warrants from Supreme Court review
- Carpenter already told us the third-party doctrine doesn’t mechanically apply to intimate location data
- The forfeiture argument disappeared at the en banc stage for a reason
THE BROADER PICTURE
Think about what geofence warrants make possible: identifying everyone who entered an abortion clinic, attended a protest, visited a mosque or church, or walked into a defense attorney’s office. That’s not hypothetical. That’s the capability.
A MOMENT TO APPRECIATE THIS WORK
Hats off to our colleagues in the Eastern District of Virginia and the defender community who have litigated this issue from a bank robbery in Richmond all the way to the Supreme Court’s conference table. This is years of grinding—building a factual record with expert testimony, getting Google involved as amicus, surviving a panel reversal, and pushing through an en banc that produced more opinions than consensus.
And here’s the thing: that work doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every suppression motion you file, every time you dig into cell site data or push back on a tower dump, every brief challenging surveillance overreach in a case that will never make the news—that’s the foundation. The “routine” work is what creates the record and preserves the issues that eventually force these questions up the appellate chain.
So, whether you’re drafting a motion in a gun case, prepping for a detention hearing, or arguing a revocation, know that it matters. The defender who first challenged this geofence warrant in the Eastern District of Virginia probably wasn’t thinking about a Supreme Court cert petition. They were just doing the job. That’s all any of us can do—and sometimes, that’s enough to change the law. Keep at it.
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