On the "General Acceptance" of Handwriting Identification Principles

• NCJ Number: 208575
• Journal: Journal of Forensic Sciences Volume: 50 Issue: 1 Dated: January 2005 Pages: 119-126
• Author(s): Michael J. Saks Ph.D.; Holly VanderHaar B.A.
• Date Published: January 2005
• Length: 8 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Survey
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

In order to determine whether handwriting identification principles meet the "general acceptance" admissibility requirements of the broad and narrow Frye tests and Daubert's general acceptance factor, this study solicited the views of two groups of professionals in the field regarding the degree to which a set of principles on the nature of handwriting and its identification are generally accepted within the respondents' fields.

Abstract

The two groups surveyed were 140 forensic document examiners who were members of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners and 64 members of the International Graphonomics Society, which is an organization composed of scientists from an array of disciplines concerned with the nature of handwriting. A questionnaire was developed to consist of questions drawn from the forensic document examination literature on handwriting identification. For a series of propositions respondents were asked to indicate, "how well accepted each proposition is among members of your field." Options for degrees of acceptance were provided. Of the 140 questionnaires sent to forensic document examiners, 13 (12 percent) useable replies were received. Of the 64 questionnaires sent to handwriting scientists, 24 (46 percent) useable replies were received. The primary data analyses consisted of testing for statistical significance in the comparison of means. Where a number of different items were compared, the "analysis of variance" was used. From the perspective of a "narrow" general acceptance test, within the field of forensic handwriting identification, the propositions endorsed most clearly involved the process of examining writing (inferences that can be drawn from the static trace); however, the foundational principles that make handwriting individualization possible were less clearly supported. The propositions concerning the dependability with which forgeries can be detected and the ratio of interwriter to intrawriter variability both showed a marginally significant departure from being "well accepted as true." Forensic document examiners and handwriting scientists apparently did not agree on the acceptability of most of the propositions. 2 tables and 18 references