The judge said the warrant was unconstitutional but allowed the evidence anyway.
In a Virginia courtroom in August 2022, a federal judge sentenced Okello Chatrie to nearly twelve years for an armed bank robbery, closing one chapter while leaving another conspicuously open. The investigation that caught him relied on a geofence warrant — a dragnet tool that swept up the location histories of nineteen innocent bystanders alongside the guilty — which the judge declared unconstitutional, then allowed into evidence anyway. In that contradiction lives a question the American legal system has not yet answered: when new surveillance technologies outpace the law's ability to constrain them, who bears the cost of that gap?
- A man with a gun and a handwritten note terrorized bank employees and threatened to kill a teller's family, setting in motion a case that would reach far beyond one robbery.
- To find him, investigators cast a digital net over nineteen strangers' phones — a technique growing in popularity precisely because it works, and precisely because it asks no questions before it searches.
- A federal judge drew a clear constitutional line, ruling the geofence warrant an unreasonable search, only to step back from the consequences by invoking the good faith exception.
- Privacy advocates warn that this outcome may be worse than a simple ruling either way — a declared violation with no remedy is an invitation to keep violating.
- Chatrie will serve his sentence, but the surveillance method that found him remains in active use nationwide, its constitutional status unresolved and its reach still expanding.
On a day in 2019, Okello Chatrie entered the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, armed with a gun and a handwritten demand for cash. He ordered employees and a customer to the floor and threatened to kill a teller's family if they resisted. Three years later, a federal judge sentenced him to 141 months in prison — nearly twelve years — for that crime. But the case had grown into something larger than the robbery itself.
To identify Chatrie, investigators used a geofence warrant, requesting from Google the location histories of every phone that had pinged near the bank during the robbery window. Nineteen devices appeared in that data. Chatrie's was among them. His lawyers argued the warrant was unconstitutional — that sweeping up nineteen people's movements without any evidence connecting them to a crime violated the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches. Prosecutors countered that Chatrie had voluntarily enabled Google's Location History feature and therefore had no reasonable expectation of privacy.
U.S. District Judge Hannah Lauck agreed with the defense on the constitutional question, finding in a March ruling that the warrant had indeed crossed a legal line. Yet she declined to suppress the evidence, reasoning that the detective had acted in good faith — consulting prosecutors beforehand and drawing on prior experience with similar warrants. The evidence stood, and so did the conviction.
The result unsettled privacy advocates. A technique declared unconstitutional had nonetheless produced usable evidence, and the good faith exception offered law enforcement a ready shield for future use. When Lauck imposed sentence, she rejected calls for leniency, citing the real harm done to real people — the threats, the gun, the customers forced to the ground. She sentenced Chatrie at the low end of federal guidelines. The man was held accountable. The tool that found him remains in wide use, and the deeper legal reckoning has yet to arrive.
Okello Chatrie walked into the Call Federal Credit Union in Midlothian, Virginia, on a day in 2019 with a handwritten note demanding cash and a gun in his hand. He waved the weapon at employees and a customer, ordered them to the floor, and made a specific threat: he would kill the bank teller's family if they didn't comply. Three years later, on a Wednesday in August 2022, a federal judge sentenced him to 141 months in prison—nearly 12 years—for that robbery. The case itself, however, had become something larger than one man's crime.
The investigation that led to Chatrie's arrest relied on a tool that has become increasingly common in American law enforcement: a geofence warrant. Rather than targeting a specific suspect, this type of warrant casts a wide net, requesting location data from Google on every phone that pinged near a particular place during a particular window of time. In this case, investigators obtained records showing 19 cell phones in the vicinity of the bank around the moment of the robbery. Chatrie's phone was among them. That data helped lead police to him.
But the constitutional questions lurking beneath that investigative success proved thorny. Chatrie's lawyers argued that the geofence warrant itself was unconstitutional—that it violated the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches by collecting location history from 19 people without any prior evidence that any of them had committed a crime. Federal prosecutors countered that Chatrie had no reasonable expectation of privacy because he had voluntarily enabled Google's Location History feature on his device.
U.S. District Judge Hannah Lauck sided with the defense on the constitutional question. In a March ruling, she found that the warrant did indeed violate the Fourth Amendment. Gathering location data on 19 phones with no evidence connecting their owners to the crime crossed a constitutional line. Yet Lauck then made a move that would shape the case's larger significance: she denied Chatrie's motion to suppress the evidence anyway. The detective, she reasoned, had acted in good faith. He had consulted with prosecutors before seeking the warrant and had relied on his experience obtaining three similar warrants in the past. Under the good faith exception to the exclusionary rule, the evidence could stand.
The ruling created an unusual tension. The judge had declared the investigative technique unconstitutional while allowing its fruits to be used against the defendant. Privacy advocates saw potential danger in that outcome. If police could continue using geofence warrants despite constitutional violations, as long as they could claim good faith, the ruling might actually make it easier for law enforcement to keep deploying the technique across the country. Geofence warrants have already helped investigators in numerous cases, and the tool's popularity shows no sign of waning.
When Lauck imposed sentence on Wednesday, she rejected a defense request for leniency. The robbery had harmed too many people, she said. The handwritten note, the gun, the threats against the teller's family, the customers and employees forced to the ground—these were not abstract harms. They were real violations of real people's safety and dignity. The sentence she imposed was at the lower end of federal guidelines, which had called for between 141 and 155 months. Chatrie would serve his time, but the larger question—how American courts will ultimately reckon with geofence warrants as investigative tools—remains unresolved.
Notable Quotes
Judge Hannah Lauck ruled the warrant violated the Constitution by gathering location history of 19 cell phones without evidence that their owners had anything to do with the crime.— Court ruling
Lauck denied a lower sentence, saying there were 'too many victims' in the robbery.— Judge Hannah Lauck
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
So the judge said the warrant was unconstitutional but let the evidence in anyway. How does that work?
It's called the good faith exception. The idea is that if a police officer reasonably believed they were following the law, even if they weren't, the evidence doesn't get thrown out. The judge found the detective had consulted with prosecutors and had done similar warrants before, so he wasn't acting recklessly.
But doesn't that basically mean the ruling doesn't matter? Police can keep doing it.
That's what privacy advocates worry about. The judge said the warrant violated the Fourth Amendment, which is a big statement. But if it doesn't actually stop police from using the technique, the practical effect is limited. It's a strange middle ground.
Why did the judge rule it was unconstitutional if she was going to allow the evidence anyway?
Because the Constitution matters independent of whether evidence gets suppressed. She was saying this practice crosses a line, even if this particular defendant doesn't benefit from that ruling. It's a signal about what the law should be, even if the immediate consequence is muted.
What makes geofence warrants different from a normal search warrant?
A normal warrant targets a specific person or place based on evidence. A geofence warrant sweeps up everyone in an area. It's like saying "give us the location data of everyone who was within a mile of this bank during this hour," with no prior reason to suspect any of them. That's the constitutional problem.
And Chatrie had actually turned on location history, so Google had the data anyway?
Yes, he'd opted in. But the defense argument was that opting in to a service doesn't mean you consent to the government accessing that data without a warrant—or at least not without a warrant that's narrowly tailored to actual suspects.