United States v. Smith
- Court
- Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (Federal circuit court)
- Decided
- 2024
- Citation
- 110 F.4th 817 (5th Cir. 2024)
- Standard applied
- Fourth Amendment particularity applied to geofence warrants
What the court held
The Fifth Circuit held that the use of geofence warrants as described in the case is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment, expressly parting ways with the Fourth Circuit's decision in Chatrie. It nonetheless affirmed the denial of suppression, because law enforcement acted in good faith in relying on this novel type of warrant.
Why
The court set out how a geofence request works in practice — a three-step process in which Google searches its entire location database for devices inside a time-and-place box, then narrows and de-anonymises — and treated that as a general search of everyone rather than a particularised search of a suspect. On remedy, the good-faith exception applied because the officers relied on a warrant issued by a neutral magistrate at a time when this warrant type was untested, and their misunderstanding of what further legal process was required did not defeat it.
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
Smith is the first federal appellate decision to condemn geofence warrants outright, and the resulting split with the Fourth Circuit is now the central open question in digital-location practice. Note how it was decided: unconstitutional in principle, admitted in fact, which means the ruling changes what investigators may do next rather than what happens in the cases already built. For anyone analysing a geofence return, the court's step-by-step description of Google's process is the clearest published account of the mechanism.
This paragraph is Legal Cyber Academy’s editorial assessment of the decision’s practical importance. The court said none of it. For what the court actually said, read the opinion.
Additional detail
Tags: geofence warrant · particularity · Google · circuit split · good faith
Cited 12times in CourtListener’s corpus at the time this entry was compiled. Treat it as a rough measure of influence, not of correctness.
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Summarised from the opinion as retrieved from CourtListener. Reference material, not legal advice. Back to the repository.