[1] During a scheduled stop in Tallahassee, Florida, police officers boarded a Greyhound bus as part of a drug interdiction effort and interviewed passengers.

[3] At trial, the passengers argued that officers violated their Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures because the police engaged in coercive behavior and never informed them that their participation in the drug interdiction efforts was voluntary.

[3] Writing for a majority of the Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy held officers need not personally advise passengers of their right to refuse consent to a search on a bus.

[11] The level of suspicion that is required to conduct a temporary detention is lower than is necessary for probable cause and is “considerably less than proof of wrongdoing by a preponderance of the evidence”; however officers cannot rely upon a mere "hunch".

[24] The United States Supreme Court first clarified the applicability of the Fourth Amendment to searches and seizures on buses in the 1991 case Florida v. Bostick, where the Court held that police officers may approach bus passengers on a random basis and ask questions and request their consent to searches, "provided a reasonable person would understand that he or she is free to refuse".

[25] The Court rejected the argument that police questioning on board a bus constitutes a per se seizure under the Fourth Amendment, and instead held that courts should use a "totality of the circumstances" test to determine whether a passenger would have felt "free to decline the officers' requests or otherwise terminate the encounter", or whether a passenger was free "to ignore the police presence and go about his business".

[28] After the passengers re-boarded, the driver allowed Officers Blackburn, Hoover, and Lang of the Tallahassee Police Department to enter the bus "as part of a routine drug and weapons interdiction effort".

[40] He explained that "[l]aw enforcement officers do not violate the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable seizures merely by approaching individuals on the street or in other public places and putting questions to them if they are willing to listen".

[41] Citing the Court's analytic framework established in Florida v. Bostick, Justice Kennedy concluded that a reasonable person would have felt free to "leav[e] the bus or otherwise terminat[e] the encounter".

[42] Justice Kennedy noted that the officers did not brandish weapons, they did not make "intimidating movements", they left the aisle clear, and they "spoke to passengers one by one and in a polite, quiet voice".

[48] Justice David Souter wrote a dissenting opinion in which he argued that the cocaine should have been suppressed because Drayton and Brown would not have felt free to leave the bus and they likely were not aware that they could have refused consent to the search.

[52] He argued that this imbalance of power may rise to a "threatening" level, which "may overbear a normal person's ability to act freely, even in the absence of explicit commands or the formalities of detention".

[55] On remand, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued a per curiam opinion affirming Drayton and Brown's convictions.

[57] Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice Souter cited Bostick and Drayton to hold that coercion should be judged according to the experiences of a "reasonable person" in the situation.

[60] The District of Columbia Circuit, for example, wrote that "while the passengers in Drayton were questioned while inside a bus with an officer positioned near the exit ... the street encounter [posed] no physical impediment to [the suspect]’s freedom to walk away".

[61] However, the Seventh Circuit has held that according to the Supreme Court's ruling in Drayton, a suspect was unlawfully detained when police approached him in a dark alley and asked him questions.

Some analysts have suggested that Drayton reflects a concern among members of the Court for "ensuring that individuals retain the power to stand up for their rights".

[66] Additionally, Ric Simmons criticized the Court's ruling for failing to reflect the realities of "real-life confrontations occurring on the street" between citizens and law enforcement.

[7] Other scholars, such as Thomas W. Hughes and Joshua Fitch, argued that the Court's decision in Drayton would impact the balance between individual liberties and heightened national security interests in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

[67] Jeremy R. Jehangiri criticized the Court's ruling for failing to account for psychological pressures inherent in the "perceived legitimacy of the [police's] authority".

[70] Joshua Fitch also criticized the Court for ignoring the impact of "racial disparagement" with respect to an individual's ability to walk away from encounters with police.

[1] Phillips suggested that the decision to abandon subjective factors could lead to "bizarre results" in cases, like this, where "circumstances of the search indicate at least some level of coercion".