Clements v. Commonwealth
The Virginia Court of Appeals admitted evidence from a Google reverse-keyword warrant under the good-faith exception while expressly declining to decide whether the warrant was constitutional.
Executive Summary
Clements is a published appellate decision about reverse-keyword warrants, but its binding suppression holding is narrow: the evidence was admissible because officers acted in objectively reasonable reliance on judicially approved warrants. The majority did not decide whether the initial warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment or Virginia Constitution.
Investigators asked Google to identify accounts that searched a victim’s street address—or “any reasonable derivatives”—during a one-hour period surrounding a violent incident. One account had searched the address at 2:22 a.m. Police returned to court for additional authorization, identified the account as belonging to Willie James Clements, Jr., and obtained further incriminating search history.
The majority held that suppression would not serve the exclusionary rule’s deterrent purpose. The warrant process occurred in 2022, before controlling authority addressed reverse-keyword warrants, and the applications contained enough factual detail and judicial oversight that reliance was not objectively unreasonable.
Judge Chaney concurred in the result but would have held the initial warrant unconstitutional. Her separate opinion reasoned that the affidavit did not establish a particularized nexus to Google data, searched unknown users first and identified a suspect later, and used an undefined derivatives clause that left significant discretion to the provider.
The Investigation
At approximately 2:20 a.m. on May 15, 2022, surveillance footage showed M.K. outside an Arlington bar after she had ordered a rideshare. Instead of entering the rideshare vehicle, she entered a dark Chevrolet SUV. An eyewitness later saw a person fall or be thrown from that SUV while it was traveling about fifty miles per hour. The SUV did not return.
Police obtained location information for M.K.’s missing cellphone because they believed it remained in the vehicle. Historical cell-site data led them to a Maryland neighborhood, where they found a black Chevrolet Traverse without a front license plate matching the vehicle description. The Traverse was registered to Clements.
The victim had fallen from the SUV about half a mile from her home, and her phone’s location history showed the vehicle passing her residence. Because investigators had no evidence that Clements knew M.K., and surveillance showed she was extremely intoxicated, they inferred that the driver likely searched her address in a navigation service to find her home.
The Reverse-Keyword Warrant
A traditional search ordinarily begins with a known person, account, device, or place. The reverse-keyword warrant worked in the opposite direction: police began with a search term they believed was connected to the crime and asked Google to identify unknown accounts that had used it.
The warrant sought Google accounts that, between 2:15 and 3:15 a.m. on May 15, 2022, searched for the victim’s address—801 North Florida Street, Arlington, Virginia—or “any reasonable derivatives” of that address.
The one-hour interval closely tracked the known incident timeline. Google reported one account that searched the address at 2:22 a.m. Police then obtained another warrant for account information and the associated phone number. That process connected the account to Clements.
The Multi-Step Judicial Process
- Initial keyword warrant: compelled Google to identify accounts matching the address query during the one-hour window.
- Account-information warrant: sought identifying information and the telephone number associated with the responsive account.
- Further evidence: the account data connected Clements to the search and disclosed additional searches about an Arlington woman jumping from a vehicle and whether police had a suspect.
The majority considered the investigators’ return to a judge at each stage important. In its view, police did not receive unfettered access to every user’s search history and did not make the final identification decision without renewed judicial authorization.
Staging a novel digital search and returning to the issuing court can reduce investigative discretion, but procedure cannot replace the threshold requirements of probable cause and particularity. Each stage still needs its own factual and legal justification.
The Majority’s Holding
The good-faith exception permitted admission of the keyword-search evidence. The supporting affidavit was not so lacking in indicia of probable cause, and the warrant was not so facially deficient, that a reasonable officer had to recognize it as invalid.
The 22-page affidavit explained why investigators believed the driver needed directions: the victim and driver apparently did not know each other, the victim was impaired, the route passed her residence, and nothing suggested that she had used her own missing phone for navigation. Those facts allowed a magistrate to infer that evidence could be found in a search provider’s records.
The majority also emphasized objective context. Officers obtained warrants before using the returned data, the technology presented a new legal question in 2022, and no controlling authority then prohibited the procedure. The applications were more limited and more factually supported than the geofence process discussed in Chatrie.
The majority expressly declined to decide the constitutional validity of reverse-keyword warrants. It also declined to determine whether Virginia’s constitutional search-and-seizure protection should be interpreted more broadly than the Fourth Amendment. The published result is an exclusionary-rule decision, not a categorical approval of the warrant technique.
Other holdings
The court also rejected Clements’s argument that the trial judge had to recuse because the same judge signed the warrant. Prior judicial involvement did not establish bias. The court further upheld the jury’s causation finding and affirmed the convictions for leaving the scene of an accident and aggravated malicious wounding.
Judge Chaney’s Concurrence
Judge Chaney agreed that good faith prevented suppression and therefore concurred in the judgment. She wrote separately because she would have reached the constitutional question and held that the initial reverse-keyword warrant was defective.
- The affidavit showed why the driver may have needed directions, but did not establish why evidence would probably be found in Google’s records rather than another navigation tool or source.
- The process searched a universe of previously unidentified users and used the results to discover a suspect, reversing the individualized sequence of an ordinary warrant.
- The phrase “any reasonable derivatives” was undefined and delegated meaningful judgment about responsive searches.
- The fact that the query produced only one account could not retroactively supply probable cause or particularity missing when the warrant issued.
- Search queries can reveal expressive and intensely private interests, magnifying the danger of broad or poorly bounded demands.
For practitioners, the concurrence is a warning about future reliance. Once appellate opinions identify specific constitutional defects, officers and prosecutors may find it harder to argue that similarly drafted warrants were used in objectively reasonable good faith.
The Role of Chatrie
The majority compared the challenged procedure with the geofence warrants considered in Chatrie v. United States. It stressed that this warrant used a specific address and one-hour period and that investigators repeatedly returned to court rather than exercising open-ended authority over a large anonymized dataset.
That comparison supported the majority’s assessment of objective reasonableness. It did not transform Chatrie into a blanket authorization for reverse-keyword searches, nor did it erase the technological distinction between a location-based geofence demand and a query-based keyword demand.
Agencies should describe what records actually exist, how the provider matches queries, what “derivatives” or variants mean, what accounts may be swept in, whether location or identity filters are technically available, and what personnel may review at each stage. Legal labels are not substitutes for technical facts.
What the Decision Does—and Does Not—Establish
- The majority did not hold that all reverse-keyword warrants are constitutional.
- It did not decide the underlying probable-cause, particularity, general-warrant, or state-constitutional questions.
- The case concerned a tightly defined one-hour window and a specific residential address, not a broad political, medical, religious, or other topical keyword.
- The responsive result was one account, but the constitutionality of a warrant is judged from the facts presented before execution, not the number of results afterward.
- The majority’s good-faith analysis relied on the novelty and unsettled state of the law in 2022; that rationale weakens as precedent develops.
- The concurrence’s constitutional analysis is persuasive reasoning from one judge, not the binding holding of the court.
- Provider practices, available filters, statutes, state constitutional law, and controlling precedent may produce a different result in another jurisdiction.
Agency Guidance
Primary Sources and Further Reading
This monograph is provided for training and general informational purposes. It is not legal advice and does not replace review of the complete opinion, current statutes, controlling federal and state authority, provider requirements, agency policy, technical documentation, or consultation with prosecutors and agency counsel.
© 2026 Shield Public Safety Training. All rights reserved. Reviewed September 3, 2026.