Professor Joel Johnson Interviewed on Supreme Court Case Chatrie v. United States -- World Radio

Professor Joel S. Johnson is interviewed on the World Radio program "The World and Everything in It: June 30, 2026" about the privacy issues in Chatrie v. United States, a Supreme Court decision concerning geofence warrants and the Fourth Amendment.

Excerpt from World Radio:

REICHARD: My legal-affairs colleague Jenny Rough now with the fourth case.

JENNY ROUGH: Finally, Chatrie versus United States. In 2019, a man robbed a bank. Typically, the police would look for evidence leading to a suspect. Here, the police had no suspect. So they got what’s known as a geofence warrant.

JOEL JOHNSON: A geofence warrant is sort of like a reverse way of doing an investigation.

Joel Johnson is a former Justice Department attorney and a professor at Pepperdine University.

JOHNSON: So the police draw what’s called a virtual perimeter, or a geofence, around … a crime scene. And they pick a time window. And then they ask a tech company, like Google, to tell them which phones or devices were inside that perimeter during that specific time.

Over a dozen innocent bystanders were swept up in the search. But police found their suspect.

He argued, though, that the government violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches, so the evidence of his location should be excluded from trial. The Supreme Court first addressed whether a geofence warrant is tantamount to a search. Answer: yes, in a 6 to 3 ruling.

JOHNSON: What they held unequivocally is that there was a search here … so presumptively you have to get a warrant, a valid warrant.

That’s now clear for all cases going forward. But what’s unclear? Whether the search was reasonable. For a warrant to be valid, a search must be justified. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the lower court to decide.

Justice Samuel Alito filed a dissent, joined in part by Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett.

Johnson says this case does two things. First:

JOHNSON: It does seem to confirm that cell phones are special under the Fourth Amendment. And I think we all intuitively agree with that. There’s a lot of privacy interest in our cell phones.

Second? The last time the court decided a Fourth Amendment cell phone case was in 2018. Since then, three new justices have joined the court. This was their first opinion on the topic, and it shows how they line up on the divided issue. But?

JOHNSON: None of them wrote very much. Barrett has a very short dissent … so she didn’t think this was a search. Kavanaugh joined the majority, … but didn’t write separately so we don’t know his specific views.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was also in the majority and didn’t write separately.

The complete interview may be found at World Radio