Professor Brandon Garrett meets with research associates in the Duke Center for Science and Justice.
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Duke Law

Data Driven

With the launch of the Duke Center for Science and Justice, Duke Law School is betting that empirical, interdisciplinary research can produce evidence-based reforms in the criminal justice system. 

During the years she drove on a suspended license, Andrèa “Muffin” Hudson lived in constant fear. Each time she got in her car to run errands in Durham or head to work, she would drive well below the speed limit and stop at yellow lights to avoid getting pulled over. But it didn’t always work. “When you don’t have a driver’s license you ‘drive nervous,’” Hudson says. “Police pick up on that and it gives them a reason to run your tag.” She racked up dozens of tickets over more than a decade, including some 60 in Durham County, and spent 10 days in jail for repeatedly driving on a suspended license, all because she couldn’t pay her fines. 

A civil rights activist, Hudson shared her story at Duke Law on March 25 during a lunchtime event marking the release of a report examining drivers’ license suspensions in North Carolina co-authored by L. Neil Williams, Jr. Professor of Law Brandon Garrett and William Crozier, a postdoctoral fellow in empirical legal research. The report places Hudson, now director of the North Carolina Community Bail Fund of Durham, among more than 1.2 million residents who lost driving privileges under a state law that triggers automatic, indefinite license suspension for reasons unrelated to driving. Those reasons include failing to pay traffic fines and court costs and failing to appear in court for traffic offenses.  

Garrett’s study of driver’s license suspensions is just one of several empirical research projects he has initiated since joining the Duke Law faculty in 2018, all aimed at informing criminal justice reform. And with the launch of the Duke Center for Science and Justice, which Garrett directs, Duke Law is poised to expand its role in the effort to craft policy solutions based on empirical evidence for other problems and inequities throughout the criminal justice system in North Carolina and beyond. The interdisciplinary center focuses on three signature areas: accuracy of evidence in criminal cases, the role of risk in criminal outcomes, and addressing a person’s treatment needs.