Forensic Document Examination

Meghan Stallworth

What is it? Forensic Document Examination is the study

of documents. It is a way of finding the authenticity of a document or determining if a document is false.

What Kind of Evidence?

Documents mainly

They are able to detect forgery, identify handwriting and signatures, Identify photocopies, and check writers and/or typewriters. They can detect if a document has been altered, if content has been added, substituted or subtracted.

Education? A Forensic Document Examiner (FDE) must

have a basic education through the baccalaureate degree. Typically, the training period is two years of study as well as practice in a lab that specializes in forensic document examination.

Techniques Examining form: size, proportion, slant,

lines, angles, curves

The newest technology loads a true sample of handwriting and a questioned form of handwriting into a computer, which then transmits it in the form of a hologram making it easy to identify differences.

Technique (cont.) Questioned hand writing is compared to a

standard handwriting and the examiner tries to find differences greater than the natural variance of a persons hand writing.

What is Standard Handwriting?

Requested and Collected

Requested standards are asked for by the Examiner to help the examination

Collected standards are standards the previously existed. (ie. bank records, letters, legal forms etc.)

Interview With Emily J. Will

- What kind of educational background is required for your job?  Answer:  You should have a 4 year college degree - preferably in criminal justice or some scientific field

What is a typical day like for you?  Answer:  Very interesting - lots of reading, doing examinations, writing reports, some days include travel to see documents in hospitals or attorneys' offices, testifying in court (but not as often as you might think) - There is a lot of variety, and a lot of responsibility.

Interview (cont.) - Are you a forensic specialist all the time or

do you have a "day job"?  Answer:  Full time

- How long have you been a forensic document examiner?  Answer:  23 years

- What made you decide to become a forensic document examiner?  Answer:  I have always been a problem solver and have a scientific/technical mind.  I had a chance meeting with a forensic document examiner many years ago, and what he did caught my interest.

Case Study In 1795, a man named Mr. Ireland claimed

he had found a script of “Kynge Leare” hand written by William Shakespeare himself.

A document analyst, Mr. Edward Malone published a refute in 1796. He discovered that the pages the script was written on all had different water marks.

Case Study (cont.) An author as famous and well off as Shakespeare would not

have needed different sources of paper, he reasoned. If he needed more he would have gone to the same paper maker and bought more. He argued that someone trying to forge the document 200 years later would try to find scraps of old paper from that time period in old books with blank pages.

In 1805, the forger admitted to doing exactly that. He revealed that he had paid a book seller to let him cut out blank pages from books of the time period.

Other Famous CasesThe

Other Famous Cases The Hitler Diaries

The JonBenet Murder

The Zodiac Killer

Sources http://www.enotes.com/forensic-science/han

dwriting-forgery

http://www.safde.org/whatwedo.htm

http://www.qdewill.com/

Emily J. Will