IC Technology & Surveillance — 2026-04-16

Minnesota Supreme Court Overturns Murder Conviction on Geofence Warrant Grounds Ahead of SCOTUS Review

The Minnesota Supreme Court overturned a murder conviction after ruling the geofence warrant used to obtain phone location data was unconstitutionally broad, though it stopped short of banning the technique outright. The decision arrives weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments on April 27 in Chatrie v. United States, which will directly address whether geofence warrants violate the Fourth Amendment. Geofence warrants, which gather location data on all devices within a defined area to identify unknown suspects, are a critical IC and law enforcement surveillance tool whose legality now faces its definitive test.

Analysis
The Minnesota ruling, reported by a single outlet but grounded in the court opinion as primary record, creates the narrowest viable Fourth Amendment precedent ahead of April 27 oral arguments in Chatrie v. United States, positioning SCOTUS to decide whether geofence warrants survive constitutional scrutiny as a class rather than on case-specific facts. A ruling restricting the technique would almost certainly compel IC and law enforcement to restructure bulk location data collection programs in the coming months, as geofence warrants function by casting a geographic net across all device data in a defined area to surface unknown subjects, a collection model with no ready operational substitute. The Court may instead use Chatrie to draw a duration-based distinction from Carpenter, preserving the tool while imposing narrower procedural requirements, given that geofence collections are temporally bounded in ways the years-long cell-site records at issue in Carpenter were not.

1 sources

Court overturns murder conviction after finding geofence warrant too broad - MPR News