Reasons for Driver License Suspension, Recidivism, and Crash Involvement Among Drivers with Suspended/revoked Licenses
Reasons for Driver License Suspension, Recidivism, and Crash Involvement Among Drivers with Suspended/revoked Licenses

Author: Jon A. Carnegie

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 27

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In February 2005, AAMVA convened a working group comprised of motor vehicle agency representatives, law enforcement professionals, judges, prosecutors, researchers and highway safety professionals from NHTSA, FHWA and FMCSA to develop a needs assessment to address the problem of driving while suspended. The working group determined that not enough was known about the depth and breadth of the issue and that research was needed to more fully understand the changing relationship between license suspension, reasons for suspension and highway safety outcomes. This study was commissioned in response to the working group's call for additional research. The research objectives defined for this study included, determining the number of drivers that are suspended/revoked under state laws that allow a driver's license to be suspended/revoked for non-driving offenses; determining the number of those drivers that are subsequently cited for driving while suspended, determining the extent of crash involvement by those drivers; and exploring the relationship between driving behavior and violations of those laws. The analysis conducted for this study provides a baseline for further discussion by the AAMVA suspended/revoked driver working group. The research results point to differences between the two groups when considering driving behavior. Overall, the analysis provides information to administrators and safety experts indicating the two groups of suspend drivers differ on multiple dimensions.

Undeliverable
Undeliverable

Author: Karima Modjadidi

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 18

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In North Carolina, one in seven adult drivers currently has a suspended license, for non-driving related reasons. The government can suspend a person's driver's license for reasons unrelated to traffic violations, including failure to appear in court and failure to pay fines. To better understand what effects these driver's license suspensions have on people, and whether they are even aware of the suspensions, we sought to survey a randomly selected 300 people in Wake County, North Carolina, who had their license 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 these people were extremely inaccurate. Over one-third had these mail surveys returned, for reasons that we detail. Only eight responded to the survey, suggesting that many others failed to receive the mail. As in many other states, in North Carolina, driver's licenses are commonly suspended for failure to appear in court in response to notice of a traffic court date. Notices of such court dates are sent by mail, typically to the address on record at the Department of Motor Vehicles, as are subsequent notices notifying people that the consequence will be a driver's license suspension. 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 for non-appearance. 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.

Driven to Failure
Driven to Failure

Author: William Crozier

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 51

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The interest of a person in a driver's license is “substantial,” and the suspension of a license by the State can result in “inconvenience and economic hardship suffered,” as the U.S. Supreme Court has observed, including because a license may “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 and county-level data regarding such suspensions. This study describes the North Carolina population of suspended drivers and assesses how driver's license suspension statutes operate relative to geography, race, and poverty. We analyze four decades of active suspension data in North Carolina, and find over 1,225,000 active suspensions for failures to appear for or pay traffic fines (amounting to one in seven adult drivers in the state). Second, we compare these data to: county population data; county-level police traffic stop data, collected as required by statute in North Carolina; and county-level data on volume and composition of traffic court dockets. We do not find that either driver's license suspensions are associated with volume of traffic stops or traffic court docket size. In contrast, we find that Blacks and Latinx are overrepresented relative to the population. Linear mixed-level modeling regression analyses demonstrate that the population of whites below poverty, and blacks above poverty, are most strongly associated with more suspensions. Finally, we explore 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.