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.

Alibis play a critical role in the criminal justice system. Yet research on the process of alibi generation and evaluation is still nascent. Indeed, similar to other widely investigated psychological phenomena in the legal system - such as false confessions, historical claims of abuse, and eyewitness memory - the basic assumptions underlying alibi generation and evaluation require closer empirical scrutiny. To date, the majority of alibi research investigates the social psychological aspects of the process. We argue that applying our understanding of basic human memory is critical to a complete understanding of the alibi process. Specifically, we challenge the use of alibi inconsistency as an indication of guilt by outlining the "cascading effects" that can put innocents at risk for conviction. We discuss how normal encoding and storage processes can pose problems at retrieval, particularly for innocent suspects that can result in alibi inconsistencies over time. Those inconsistencies are typically misunderstood as intentional deception, first by law enforcement, affecting the investigation, then by prosecutors affecting prosecution decisions, and finally by juries, ultimately affecting guilt judgments. Put differently, despite the universal nature of memory inconsistencies, a single error can produce a cascading effect, rendering an innocent individual's alibi, ironically, proof of guilt. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.