The United States Supreme Court reversed, ruling that the encounter between the passenger and the police was not necessarily a seizure for purposes of the Fourth Amendment, because: 1) if the same encounter had taken place before the passenger boarded the bus, it would not have risen to the level of a seizure, inasmuch as the Supreme Court has dealt with similar encounters in airports and has found them to be the sort of consensual encounters that implicate no Fourth Amendment interest; 2) the argument that the encounter constituted a seizure because prior Supreme Court cases have used language indicating that a seizure occurs when a reasonable person would believe he or she is not free to leave, and under the circumstances of the instant encounter a reasonable bus passenger would hot have felt free to leave because there is nowhere to go on a bus and because the bus was about to depart - was unpersuasive, because the passenger's freedom of movement had been restricted by a factor independent of police conduct and; 3) the appropriate inquiry in such a situation is whether a reasonable person would feel free to decline the officers' requests or otherwise terminate the encounter.
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