Geofencing allows the government to draw a virtual fence around a geographic area where a crime was committed. After that, the government seeks a warrant not to search a home or office, but to require a tech company to search its data to identify any of its millions of users who were within the geofence line at the time of the crime.
The case against Alexander Villa has long been contested, with troubling questions about how his conviction was secured, including confessions that were later recanted and evidence that appears shaky or missing.
"What's most problematic is that the extraordinary has become ordinary. It's just a matter of course now that when you issue an opinion that some people don't like, you're going to get threats, you're going to get death threats, and that is obviously problematic on many levels."
As you know, Section 215 authorities are not interpreted in the same way that grand jury subpoena authorities are, and we are concerned that when Justice Department officials suggest that the two authorities are 'analogous' they provide the public with a false understanding of how surveillance is interpreted in practice.
The Younger abstention doctrine provides that federal courts are not to interfere with pending state criminal proceedings. The doctrine is rarely invoked in regulatory disputes, but it can block federal courts from intervening when state criminal prosecutions are already underway. If the judge applies it here, the federal case could effectively stall while the state case proceeds.
The court rejected the government's first two requests for a search warrant because they were too broad. The court was "concerned about both the scope of the proposed search warrant and the government's apparent attempt to collect information about Ms. Natanson's confidential sources." The search warrant ultimately approved by the court was limited to information that Natanson received from Aurelio Luis Perez-Lugones and information related to Perez-Lugones that could be evidence in the case against him.
Hemani is the first time since the Supreme Court's decision in Bruen upended Second Amendment jurisprudence that the court has addressed the constitutionality of laws that prosecute individuals for owning guns solely based upon a category that the gun owner falls into. In United States v. Rahimi, which the court decided in 2024, the defendant had been deemed dangerous by a family court judge, based on allegations made by his former girlfriend.
