Chatrie v. United States
The Supreme Court ruled that police conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they used a geofence warrant to obtain a bank robbery suspect's Google location history, because people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in records of their cell phone's movements.
The decision extends the Court's 2018 Carpenter ruling on cell-tower records to Google's more precise Location History service, meaning police generally need a warrant to access this kind of data, while leaving it to a lower court to decide whether this particular warrant was valid.
How it got here: A federal trial court found the geofence warrant unconstitutional but admitted the evidence under the good-faith exception; a Fourth Circuit panel and an evenly divided en banc court affirmed, and the Supreme Court agreed to review only the search question.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A man robbed a Virginia credit union in 2019, threatening a teller and taking $195,000 before fleeing on foot. With few leads, police obtained a warrant requiring Google to hand over Location History data — detailed records of cell-phone movements collected every two minutes — for phones near the bank around the time of the robbery. That process eventually identified Okello Chatrie, who was later charged with the robbery and related firearms offenses.
The question before the Court
When police used a "geofence" warrant to get Google location data pinpointing everyone near a bank at the time it was robbed, did that count as a Fourth Amendment search?
Why it matters
Police departments across the country increasingly use geofence warrants to identify suspects, and this ruling confirms that accessing this kind of Google location data is a search requiring Fourth Amendment justification. Companies holding detailed digital location records, and the millions of people who use location-tracking features on their phones, gain clearer constitutional protection, even though Google has since changed how it stores this data.
What changes now
The case returns to the Fourth Circuit, which must now decide whether the geofence warrant's three-step process satisfied the Fourth Amendment's probable cause and particularity requirements, and separately whether the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule still permits use of the evidence against Chatrie. This is a final ruling on the search question, but the ultimate outcome for Chatrie's conviction remains undecided pending further proceedings.
What this does not decide
The Court decided only that accessing Google's Location History data was a Fourth Amendment search; it did not decide whether the specific geofence warrant used here was valid, whether the evidence must be suppressed, or whether the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule applies — those questions go back to the lower court.
Concurrences and dissents
How the Justices voted
Majority (5). Justice Kagan (author), joined by Justice Roberts, Justice Sotomayor, Justice Kavanaugh, and Justice Jackson.
Separate writings (1). Justice Gorsuch (author of a concurrence).
Dissent (3). Justice Alito (author), joined by Justice Thomas and Justice Barrett.
Concurrence — Justice Jackson
Justice Jackson agreed a search occurred but would have gone further to hold the search unreasonable. She argued the warrant's second and third steps let officers gather more location and identifying data without any real magistrate oversight or narrowing criteria, leaving too much discretion to police and no judicial check on probable cause at those stages.
Concurrence — Justice Gorsuch
Justice Gorsuch agreed a search occurred but rejected the Court's reliance on the 'reasonable expectation of privacy' test from Katz and its third-party doctrine offshoot, calling both unmoored from the Constitution's text. He would instead ask whether Location History counts as Chatrie's personal 'effect' under the Fourth Amendment's text, concluding that it does because he retained rights to access, edit, and delete it.
Dissent — Justice Alito
“To make matters worse, the majority does all this in an advisory opinion.”Alito's objection that the Court decided a question that could not change the case's outcome.
Justice Alito argued the Court should not have decided the search question at all because resolving it could not change the outcome given the Fourth Circuit's independent good-faith ruling, making the opinion advisory. On the merits, he argued that under traditional Fourth Amendment principles and the third-party doctrine, Chatrie voluntarily shared his location with Google and had no reasonable expectation of privacy in a mere two-hour, largely public-place data request.
Dissent — Justice Barrett
Justice Barrett agreed with the Court's decision to grant review but sided with Justice Alito on the merits, concluding that under existing Fourth Amendment precedent, including Carpenter, Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy in the location data he voluntarily disclosed to Google. Read the full dissent →
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied its 2018 ruling in Carpenter v. United States, which held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements, making government access to detailed cell-phone location records a Fourth Amendment search.
- The Court compared Google's Location History service to the cell-tower records at issue in Carpenter and found Location History even more revealing: it pinpoints a phone within about twenty meters, logs location roughly every two minutes, and can even identify which floor of a building a phone is on.
- The Court rejected the argument that accessing only a short window of location data (here, two hours) falls outside the Fourth Amendment, reasoning that the Amendment applies regardless of how much information the government actually obtains, and that letting officers cherry-pick a narrow slice from an all-encompassing database does not lessen the underlying privacy intrusion.
- The Court declined to apply the 'third-party doctrine' — the rule from older cases that people lose privacy protection in information voluntarily shared with banks or phone companies — because Location History, like the cell records in Carpenter, is not truly 'shared' in any meaningful sense; users generate it automatically just by using ordinary phone features that have become indispensable to daily life.
- Having concluded that a search occurred, the Court then held that this did not resolve whether the multi-step geofence warrant itself was reasonable, since that separate question turns on whether each stage of the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment's requirements of probable cause and particularity — an issue the Court left for the lower court to decide first.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Carpenter v. United States (585 U. S. 296)
The Court extends Carpenter's reasoning on cell-tower records to hold Google's more detailed location data equally protected.
Distinguishes United States v. Miller (425 U. S. 435)
The Court says bank record sharing in Miller differs from location data because location data isn't truly 'shared.'
Distinguishes United States v. Knotts (460 U. S. 276)
The Court says beeper tracking along public roads in Knotts doesn't control because Location History reaches into private spaces.