The development of a program for characterizing forensic handwriting examiners’ expertise : Signature examination pilot study

Criticisms levelled at forensic handwriting examina tion expertise have focused on the clear lack of validation evidence offered to substantiate the claims of its practitioners. In general, expertise can be thought of as a skill that is more developed in the specialist than in the lay person. This paper out lines the shift in the process for delineating, and in time articulating, the nature of the expertise claimed within the Australian and New Zealand government and police document examination communities. A pilot study is presented where we com pared the opinions regarding the authorship of one hundred and fifty questioned signatures between seven government trained document examiners and eight lay persons. It was found that the government trained document examiners were statistically better at accurately determining the authorship of questioned signatures than were the lay group.