Justice in the Digital Age: Privacy, Punishment, and Power

Two Supreme Court decisions from the past year show how criminal justice often involves a conflict between public safety, individual rights, and the finality of punishment. *Chatrie v. United States* dealt with digital privacy during a police investigation, while *Rutherford v. United States* concerned prisoners serving sentences that would be much shorter if imposed today. Together, the cases show that justice is not only about determining guilt. It is also about deciding what powers the government should have and whether punishment remains fair over time.

In *Chatrie v. United States*, police investigating a Virginia bank robbery obtained a “geofence warrant.” This required Google to identify phones located near the bank around the time of the crime. The search eventually led investigators to Okello Chatrie. In June 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that obtaining this location information was a search under the Fourth Amendment because people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their cellphone-location records. The Court did not decide whether the warrant itself was reasonable, leaving that issue to a lower court. This was an important decision because geofence warrants can collect information about innocent people who merely happen to be near a crime scene. Police need modern tools, but the convenience of those tools should not allow the government to treat everyone in an area as a possible suspect.

The second example is *Rutherford v. United States*. Daniel Rutherford received more than forty years in prison partly because federal firearm penalties were “stacked,” creating a long mandatory sentence. Congress later changed the law so that similar defendants would receive shorter sentences, but it chose not to make that reform retroactive. In May 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that this difference between old and new sentences could not itself justify compassionate release. The ruling followed the text of the law, but it also produced an uncomfortable result: two people who committed the same crime can receive dramatically different punishments simply because they were sentenced in different years.

These cases show that criminal justice is shaped by more than whether a person committed a crime. *Chatrie* placed a meaningful limit on digital surveillance, while *Rutherford* emphasized the stability of sentences even when later reforms expose serious inequalities. In my view, the first decision correctly adapted constitutional privacy to modern technology. The second shows why Congress should clearly decide whether sentencing reforms apply to people already in prison. A fair system must protect society, but it must also limit government power and remain willing to correct punishments that no longer make sense.