US v. Chatrie: In 2019 someone robbed a bank in Midlothian, Virginia. There were no leads, except that a police officer noticed that the bank robber, on video, could be seen using his cell phone. Police obtained a “geofence warrant” from a state court, ordering Google to turn over anonymized location data for any Android phone within a 150-meter radius of the bank for a half-hour before and after the robbery. Over the course of subsequent requests and data dumps from Google, investigators identified Chatrie as being in the area at the time of the robbery. He was arrested, charged with bank robbery and use of a firearm, and moved to suppress the evidence obtained from the geofence warrants. The district court denied the motion. Chatrie entered into a conditional guilty plea and was sentenced to 142 months in prison.
On appeal, a sharply divided Fourth Circuit affirmed Chatrie’s conviction. While the district court had denied Chatrie’s motion by applying the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule, the court affirmed on a different ground – that Chatrie lacked standing to challenge the geofence warrant in the first place. Applying the third-party doctrine, the court concluded that given the temporally limited nature of the information gathered and the fact that Android users had to affirmatively choose to have location data collection on their phones (2/3ds of users don’t), that Chatrie voluntarily provided the data to the third party.
Judge Wynn dissented, at length (the dissent is longer than the majority opinion), which prompted a substantial rebuttal in the majority opinion. Judge Wynn argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in Carpenter had changed the legal landscape when it came to information like the location data at issue here and that the third-party doctrine no longer applied.
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