Chatrie v. United States
The Court holds that police conduct a Fourth Amendment search when they obtain a person's Google Location History data, because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information. That expectation is not defeated by the short, two-hour span of data the government obtained or by the fact that the records were held by a third-party company. The Court leaves for the Fourth Circuit the further question whether this particular geofence warrant made the search reasonable.
Case background
In 2019, a man robbed a credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Local police could not identify a suspect, so they obtained a geofence warrant directed to Google, requiring the company to hand over data about the cell phones located within a 150-meter radius of the credit union near the time of the crime. That data came from Location History, a Google service that records a user’s cell-phone location every two minutes or so. The warrant set out a three-step process: Google first produced anonymized location data for all phones inside the geofence in the half hour before and after the robbery; officers then narrowed the list and Google supplied additional anonymized data covering a two-hour window; and finally officers narrowed the list again and Google turned over identifying information, including names and phone numbers. That process identified three users, including petitioner Okello Chatrie, whose data showed him entering the geofence about ten minutes before the robbery. Chatrie, charged with robbery and related firearms offenses, moved to suppress the location data as the fruit of an invalid Fourth Amendment search. The District Court found the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment but denied suppression under the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule, and after a divided panel and an evenly divided en banc court, the Fourth Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court granted certiorari solely on whether the police violated the Fourth Amendment in obtaining Chatrie’s location data.
Questions Presented
(1) Whether the execution of the geofence warrant violated the Fourth Amendment.
Holding
Police officers conducted a Fourth Amendment search when they acquired Chatrie’s location data from Google, because an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in his cell-phone location information. Everything the Court relied on in Carpenter v. United States to hold that accessing cell-site location information is a search applies as well or better to Location History, which is even more precise and revealing. Neither the limited two-hour period of data obtained nor its storage by a third-party company defeats that expectation of privacy, and the third-party doctrine does not apply. Because the Fourth Amendment prohibits only unreasonable searches, the Court does not decide whether this search was reasonable, leaving to the Court of Appeals whether, at each step of the search process, the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of probable cause and particularity.
The Court
Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Sotomayor, Kavanaugh, and Jackson joined. Justice Jackson filed a concurring opinion, in which Justice Sotomayor joined. Justice Gorsuch filed an opinion concurring in the judgment. Justice Alito filed a dissenting opinion, in which Justice Thomas joined as to Part I, and in which Justice Barrett joined as to Parts II–B, II–C–1, and II–C–2. Justice Barrett filed a dissenting opinion.
What this episode contains
This episode is an AI-narrated reading of the majority opinion in Chatrie v. United States, written by Justice Kagan.
AI disclosure: The voice in this episode is AI-generated, using a machine learning model styled to loosely resemble the authoring justice. Tone, inflection, pacing, and emphasis are artifacts of the model and should not be attributed to Justice Kagan. The text being read is the Court’s published majority opinion, lightly adapted to improve readability for the spoken format.