page_title: United States v. Drayton
section_title: Dissenting opinion of Justice Souter
hierarchical_section_title: United States v. Drayton / Opinion of the Court / Dissenting opinion of Justice Souter
caption_attribution_description: Associate Justice David Souter of the US Supreme Court Deutsch: Richter David Souter Español: El Juez David Souter, circa 1990 Polski: David Hackett Souter
context_page_description: United States v. Drayton, 536 U.S. 194, was a case in which the United States Supreme Court clarified the applicability of Fourth Amendment protections to searches and seizures that occur on buses, as well as the function of consent during searches by law enforcement. During a scheduled stop in Tallahassee, Florida, police officers boarded a Greyhound bus as part of a drug interdiction effort and interviewed passengers. After talking to two of the passengers and asking if they could "check [their] person", officers discovered the two passengers had taped several packages of cocaine to their legs. 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.
  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.
context_section_description: 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. He noted that "[t]he commonplace precautions of air travel have not, thus far, been justified for ground transportation" and that "no such conditions have been placed on passengers getting on trains or buses". Additionally, Justice Souter argued that police officers "exercise power free from immediate check, and when the attention of several officers is brought to bear on one civilian the imbalance of immediate power is unmistakable". 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".
  After analyzing the encounter between Drayton, Brown, and the police, Justice Souter concluded that the interdiction "was not a consensual exercise". He argued that the manner in which the police conducted the interdiction created an "atmosphere of obligatory participation". He concluded that Drayton and Brown were "pinned-in by the officers", and that "it was reasonable to suppose no passenger would tend to his own business until the officers were ready to let him". Consequently, Justice Souter concluded that officers engaged in "threatening" behavior that constituted an unreasonable, non-consensual search and seizure.
caption: In his dissenting opinion, Justice David Souter (pictured) compared the encounter in the bus to a "scene in a narrow alley."[49]
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