This article published in Justice Evaluation examines the impact of driver’s license suspensions. The authors surveyed people in North Carolina (N = 853) and found that 18% of respondents had a suspended license, with race and low income predicting higher suspension rates, and increased difficulty for daily activities and ability to pay for housing. The authors also […]
Publication Type: Articles
Battling to a draw: Defense expert rebuttal can neutralize prosecution fingerprint evidence
By Gregory Mitchell and Brandon L. Garrett in Applied Cognitive Psychology (2021) This study examined whether a defense rebuttal expert can effectively educate jurors on the risk that the prosecution’s fingerprint expert made an error. Using a sample of 1716 jury-eligible adults, the authors examined the impact of three types of rebuttal testimony in a mock […]
Life Without Parole Sentencing in North Carolina
What explains the puzzle of life without parole (LWOP) sentencing in the United States? In the past two decades, LWOP sentences have reached record highs, with over 50,000 prisoners serving LWOP. Yet during this same period, homicide rates have steadily declined. To shed light on what might explain the sudden rise of LWOP, this report […]
Judging Eyewitness Evidence
Researchers have shown how eyewitness misidentification results in conviction of the innocent — and revealed the role that poorly designed and suggestive police procedures can play. This article examines the role that poorly designed court procedures can play. By: Brandon L. Garrett – Judicature (2020). Read the article
Driven to Failure: An Empirical Analysis of Driver’s License Suspension in North Carolina
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. By: William E. Crozier and Brandon L. Garrett – Duke Law Journal (2020). Read the article
Error Rates, Likelihood Ratios, and Jury Evaluation of Forensic Evidence
This study examines the impact of providing jurors with testimony further qualified by error rates and likelihood ratios, for expert testimony concerning two forensic disciplines: commonly used fingerprint comparison evidence and a novel technique involving voice comparison. By: Brandon L. Garrett, William E. Crozer, and Rebecca Grady – Journal of Forensic Sciences (2020). Read the […]
Judging Risk
This article examines in detail the judging of risk assessment and why decision makers so often fail to consistently use such quantitative information. By: Brandon L. Garrett and John Monahan – California Law Review (2020). Read the article
Open risk assessment
Lack of transparency has become pressing in the area of risk assessment, as entire judicial systems have adopted some type of risk assessment scheme. While the types of information used in a risk tool may be made public, often the underlying methods, validation data, and studies are not – nor are the assumptions behind how […]
Juvenile Life Without Parole in North Carolina
This article aims to empirically assess the rise and then the fall in Juvenile Life without Parole (JLWOP) sentencing in a leading sentencing state, North Carolina, to better understand these trends and their implications. By: Ben Finholt, Brandon L. Garrett, Karima Modjadidi, and Kristen Renberg – Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology (2020). Read the […]
Undeliverable: Suspended Driver’s Licenses and the Problem of Notice
This article examines the impact of undeliverable mailings when attempting to survey people in North Carolina whose driver’s licenses had been suspended. 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 […]