Driven to Failure: An Empirical Analysis of Driver’s License Suspension in North Carolina

A person’s interest in a driver’s license is “substantial,” and as the U.S. Supreme Court has observed, the suspension of a license by the state can result in “inconvenience and economic hardship suffered,” including because a license may be “essential in the pursuit of a livelihood.” However, forty-four U.S. states currently require indefinite suspension of driver’s licenses for non-driving-related reasons, such as failure to appear in court or pay fines for traffic infractions. There are no systematic, peer-reviewed analyses of individual-level or county-level data regarding such suspensions. This study describes North Carolina’s population of suspended drivers and assesses how driver’s license suspension statutes operate relative to geography, race, and poverty level. First, it analyzes four decades of active-suspension data in North Carolina and finds over 1,225,000 active suspensions for failures to appear or pay traffic fines, amounting to one in seven adult drivers in the state. Second, it compares these data to county-population data; county-level traffic-stop data, collected as required by statute in North Carolina; and county-level data on the volume and composition of traffic court dockets. This study reveals that driver’s license suspensions are not associated with either the volume of traffic stops or the size of the traffic court docket. In contrast, we find that black and Latinx people are overrepresented relative to the population. Linear mixed-level modeling regression analyses demonstrate that the population of white people below the poverty line and black people above the poverty line are most strongly associated with more suspensions. Finally, this Article explores implications of these results for efforts to reconsider the imposition of driver’s license suspensions for non-driving-related reasons. These patterns raise constitutional concerns and practical challenges for policy efforts to undo such large-scale suspension of driving privileges

The Anatomy of Salvation: Robert Grosseteste on Christ’s Death, Passion, and Satisfaction

While Robert Grosseteste’s contribution to the 13th-century debate on the reason for the Incarnation is well known, his novel theory of what caused Christ’s death, and in particular the role which it plays in shaping his understanding of the atonement, has largely gone unexplored. This article first outlines Grosseteste’s belief that Christ died not as a result of the cross, but rather as a result of his divine will, focusing specifically upon on his scientific arguments showing that at the moment of his death Christ’s body was still ‘healthy and whole.’ The article then shows how Grosseteste makes his theory of Christ’s self-immolation central to his account of satisfaction. Particular attention is paid to the role of suffering in Grosseteste’s theory of the redemption and how he places charity and the Aristotelian notion of friendship at the heart of Christ’s satisfactory act, thereby prefiguring something of Aquinas’s key ideas

Philosophy’s Resurrection: Richard Fishacre on Theology, Light, and the Stars

This article explores Richard Fishacre’s (1200–1248) thinking on the relationship between theology and philosophy. It shows how, despite constructing what, on the surface at least, appears to be a traditional understanding of theology’s relationship to philosophy, Fishacre in practice offers a very creative interpretation of how the two sciences interact. For Fishacre, theology does not simply illumine philosophy by guiding it away from error. Instead, it steps into the fray of ordinary philosophical dispute so as to uncover novel ways of reading natural phenomena, ones which philosophy, by itself at least, is blind to. To demonstrate how this is so, the article explores how Fishacre appeals to Christ’s resurrected body to justify some of his most controversial arguments in the field of natural philosophy. Two specific areas are considered: Fishacre’s claim that light in medio is a body and his assertion that the stars and planets are made from the terrestrial elements as opposed to the celestial quintessence, as Aristotle claims. Each of these aspects of Fishacre’s physics show how, for the Dominican, theology can, when appropriate, step onto the philosophical plane and help the natural philosopher to discover truths that go against the philosophical consensus

A Method for the Production of Longitudinal Sound Vibrations in a Rod

In connection with some work being done in the testing of acoustic wave filters in solid media, a method has been developed for the production of longitudinal sound vibrations in a rod. Electrical oscillations are generated in a vacuum tube oscillator, pass through two stages of power amplification, and are used as the input to a special oscillator attached to the end of the rod. This oscillator is similar in principle and construction to the Fessenden oscillator used in submarine sound signaling. Vibrations which have a fair purity of tone, and which have a considerable intensity over a wide range of frequencies are obtained in the rod

Automatically Guilty: Associations Between Evidence and Guilt

Both real-life cases and laboratory research demonstrate that confession evidence is very convincing—even when it should not be. Could this be due to an automatic association between a confession and guilt? We tested this possibility using a Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) list, which measures automatic associations by presenting participants with a list of words that are thematically related but, importantly, lack the word describing the theme (“critical lure”). When the association between the list words and the theme is sufficiently strong, participants incorrectly report seeing the critical lure. We hypothesized that participants would show more false recall for seeing “guilty” on a “guilty”-themed DRM list when the list included evidence that is automatically associated with guilt, such as “confession” and “DNA.” Although our previous research on this topic found no significant effects, we addressed limitations of that research in three studies using an Amazon MechanicalTurk sample. Our first study addressed a possible ceiling effect by decreasing the associative strength of our “guilty” list. Our second study increased external validity by presenting our DRM List as a DRM Story—a narrative format that provides context for the list words. Our third study investigated the effects of priming evidence quality on the association to guilty. Overall, we found little support for our hypotheses. Across all three studies, we did not detect any effects of the evidence type (Study 1, 2, and 3) or prime type (Study 3). We did, however, find several interesting trends in the data. We discuss explanations for the lack of significant findings and address directions for future research. Specifically, adapting this paradigm for other research applications and to increase our understanding of the memorial effects of the “guilty” DRM list

Rethinking the Ken Through the Lens of Psychological Science

Canadian courts regularly exclude psychological expert evidence that would explain the factors that produce mistaken eyewitness identifications and false confessions (two significant sources of wrongful convictions). Courts justify these exclusions on the basis that the evidence is not beyond the ken of the trier of fact—the psychologist would simply be describing an experience shared by the judge and jury. In this article, the authors suggest this reasoning rests on two fundamental misunderstandings of psychology: unconscious neglect and dispositionism. In other words, judges mistakenly assume the trier of fact understands the unconscious situational forces that distort memories and cause innocent people to confess. Moreover, judges appear to prefer dispositional evidence of some disorder or syndrome suffered by the accused or by the witness to the crime. After demonstrating evidence of such reasoning in several decisions, the authors suggest reforms based on a more nuanced understanding of human psychology

Undeliverable: Suspended Driver’s Licenses and the Problem of Notice

In North Carolina, one in seven adult drivers currently has a suspended license for nondriving related reasons.  As in many other states, in North Carolina, driver’s licenses are commonly suspended, for reasons unrelated to safety, when a person fails to appear in court in response to notice of a traffic court date or fails to pay traffic fines.  Notices of traffic court dates are sent by mail, typically to the address on record at the Department of Motor Vehicles, as are subsequent notices that the consequence for nonappearance will be a driver’s license suspension.  To better understand the effects of these driver’s license suspensions and whether individuals are even aware of the suspensions, we sought to survey a randomly selected 300 people in Wake County, North Carolina who had their licenses suspended between 2017–2018.  We sent these surveys by mail and found something unexpected and unrelated to many of the survey questions themselves: that the addresses on file for individuals whose licenses had been suspended were often inaccurate.  Over one-third of these mail surveys were returned to sender.  These undeliverable mailings suggest that large numbers of people, numbering perhaps in the hundreds of thousands in North Carolina, never receive actual notice of either their court date or the drastic consequence of nonappearance.  Further, they may have no idea that the state has suspended their license, and as a result, may suffer severe consequences if later stopped for driving with a revoked license.  We conclude by discussing the due process and policy problems implied by these findings

Mock Jurors’ Evaluation of Firearm Examiner Testimony

Objectives: Firearms experts traditionally have testified that a weapon leaves “unique” toolmarks, so bullets or cartridge casings can be visually examined and conclusively matched to a particular firearm. Recently, due to scientific critiques, Department of Justice policy, and judges’ rulings, firearms experts have tempered their conclusions. In two experiments, we tested whether this ostensibly more cautious language has its intended effect on jurors (Experiment 1), and whether cross-examination impacts jurors’ perception of firearm testimony (Experiment 2). Hypotheses: Four hypotheses were tested. First, jurors will accord significant weight to firearm testimony that declares a “match” compared to testimony that does not (Experiments 1 and 2). Second, variations to “match” language will not affect guilty verdicts (Experiment 1). Third, only the most cautious language (“cannot exclude the gun”) would lower guilty verdicts (Experiment 1). Fourth, cross-examination will reduce guilty verdicts depending on specific language used (Experiment 2). Method: In two preregistered, high-powered experiments with 200 mock jurors per cell, participants recruited from Qualtrics Panels were presented with a criminal case containing firearms evidence, which varied the wording of the examiner’s conclusion and whether cross-examination was present. These variations include conclusion language used by practitioners, language advised by government organizations, and language required by judges in several cases. Participants gave a verdict, rated the evidence and expert in all conditions. Results: Guilty verdicts significantly increased when a match was declared compared to when a match was not declared. Variation in conclusion language did not affect guilty verdicts nor did it affect jurors’ estimates of the likelihood the defendant’s gun fired the bullet recovered at the crime scene. In contrast, however, a more cautious conclusion that an examiner “cannot exclude the defendant’s gun” did significantly reduce guilty verdicts and likelihood estimates alike. The presence of cross-examination did not affect these findings. Conclusion: Apart from the most limited language (“cannot exclude the defendant’s gun”), judicial intervention to limit firearms conclusion language is not likely to produce its intended effect. Moreover, cross-examination does not appear to affect perceptions or individual juror verdicts