RICHMOND, Va. — A Virginia man has been sentenced to nearly 12 years in prison on federal bank robbery charges in a case that tested the constitutionality of broad search warrants that use Google location history to identify people who were near the scene of a crime.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Okello Chatrie, 27, was sentenced Wednesday in the 2019 robbery of the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian.
Chatrie’s lawyers had argued the use of a “geofence warrant” to identify people who were near the scene of the robbery violated their constitutional protection against unreasonable searches. Federal prosecutors argued Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy since he voluntarily opted in to Google’s Location History.
U.S. District Judge Hannah Lauck ruled in March that the warrant violated the Constitution by gathering the location history of 19 cell phones — including Chatrie’s — near the bank at the time of the robbery without having any evidence that their owners had anything to do with the crime. Geofence warrants seek location data on every person within a specific location over a certain period of time.