Chapter 10
Katherine Schoenberger is a forensic document examiner: Her job is to determine whether a document is authentic or bogus and then to testify about her findings in courts of law. If an heir contests a will, Schoenberger can be called upon to determine whether its signature is genuine. If someone receives an anonymous note in the mail, she could be hired to assess who might have written it.
The range of documents that Schoenberger might be hired to forensically examine is broad—from scrawled notes on bathroom walls to marks on paper calendars and letters from angry members of a homeowners’ association. Many are “death related”—contracts, wills, estates, and powers of attorney—that contain signatures whose authenticity is under dispute in a legal case.
Forensic document examiners, whose work is based on science and evidence as opposed to psychology, see themselves as far more expert and accurate than graphologists. Trained in police laboratories, they work with pen tips and paper watermarks instead of upward strokes, and are uninterested in deducing personality traits or psychoanalyzing people by their writing. They just want to find out who the writer was and then prove it in a court of law. But they are involved, broadly, in the same questions: Do we each have a unique script? Is handwriting like snowflakes or fingerprints, something that is never exactly duplicated?
Schoenberger’s dream, as a kid, was to be Quincy, the forensic pathologist star of the 1980s television show. “Quincy was my role model! But then I started taking pre-med classes and realized I was more interested in things than in bodies. I just wanted to explore and investigate.” She went to Michigan State for an M.A. degree in forensic science, then spent two years being exhaustively trained in a Mississippi crime lab.
The variety of ways one can forge a signature—and, by definition, authenticate one—are dizzying. Schoenberger had to learn about different types of paper, pen, and inks, how to deal with burnt documents, torn paper, and photocopies made by laser printers, ink-jet printers, typewriters, fax machines, and photocopiers. Schoenberger can take a grid, lay it over a document, and check to see if it has been run through a printer or photocopier twice; she can tell if something written in ink on a printed piece of paper was added before or after it was run through the printer. She had to learn how to identify indentations on a piece of paper; using a pencil to shade over words that may be hidden is now bad form, and she uses an electronic static data apparatus to reveal the secret words on an apparently blank sheet.
Although she had to learn the Palmer Method, D’Nealian, Zaner-Bloser, and other American scripts, few of her cases require her to testify about them. More commonly she finds corroborating evidence through pens (ballpoint pens have wear on the metal tips that can indicate if the pen was used clockwise or counterclockwise), paper, or indentations. Writing tools such as pens and toner are more reliably unique than any one person’s handwriting.
To authenticate a document, Schoenberger needs a “known sample,” ideally several. She solved one case by identifying the font used on the printed envelope of a letter. “It was an unfamiliar type style. I searched fonts, and I identified it as Eva Antiqua. That font is not included in the standard fonts used by Word. I paid to buy the font and put it on my computer to test it. If the suspect had Eva Antiqua on her computer, that would help corroborate the case against her.”
However, this sort of corroboration—a series of matches that indicate probability—is about as close to “certain” that Schoenberger can get. Her own judgment has changed as she gains more experience: “I have become less and less sure if a document is authentic or bogus as I get older. I know less as I learn more.”
Lawyers have had a difficult time introducing handwriting as evidence since the practice began in England, in 1836, when a judge, John Taylor Coleridge (the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s nephew), admitted it in his landmark case, Doe v. Suckermore. Coleridge’s ruling was restrictive: A letter or signature could be introduced as evidence only if someone who knew the writer witnessed the act of writing—testimony in which the eyewitness also had to know the character of the person. As Coleridge put it: “We best acquire a knowledge of [handwriting] character, by seeing the individual write at times when his manner of writing is not in question … in his natural manner.” 1 If a grandmother once saw her grandson writing a letter, she could testify as an expert on his handwriting. Postmen, who arguably saw more of an individual’s handwriting than anyone—or family members who had never seen a defendant write—were disqualified. Witnesses had to have a sense of the individual as a person, because handwriting and character had been linked in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2
By the late nineteenth century, changes in society and conceptions of handwriting created a need for new laws. More people were literate, meaning more handwriting could be introduced in cases; bureaucracy increased, creating more documents; empirical science was emergent, creating different expectations of witnesses; and handwriting was becoming less rigidly class based.
The premise that only someone who knew the character of a person and had witnessed the writer in action could testify in court caused judges in America to grumble that amateurs who had little familiarity with a case could decide it. One called handwriting “the most unsatisfactory species of evidence Courts of justice have to deal with.”3 In 1913, Congress passed the general comparison statute, which allowed “the introduction of admitted or proven handwriting exemplars for comparative purposes.”4 With this statute, handwriting became a legal way to identify an individual, and experts were required to testify on the veracity of that individual’s handwriting received in evidence for the purposes of comparison.5
Master penmen quickly jumped into this newly formed specialty, rebranding themselves as handwriting experts with the title of “questioned document examiners.” Daniel Ames was one of the first such examiners. Ames had authored penmanship copybooks through the 1890s,6 but with the introduction of the typewriter and better pen technology, he and other itinerant men traveling the country giving penmanship lessons were finding it harder to drum up students. As penmen, they had used the same rhetoric as Spencer and Palmer: Their services would uplift citizens, making them more moral and Christian through penmanship. Now, as experts, they needed science, so they swapped religion for empiricism and, like graphologists, created a system.
A known sample was examined for “quality of line” (affected by pen position, pressure, rhythm, speed, tremor, skill, and other factors), form (including proportions, slant, beginning and ending strokes, flourishes, and the like), and spelling and punctuation (a consequence of education).7While this more scientifically rigorous method replaced the “disputatious metaphysics and the vague indications of subjective impressions” of testimony in the pre-statute era,8 the correlation between detail—slant, pressure, proportions—and conclusion remained fuzzy. For instance, Ames analyzed loops, connections between letters, and letter forms to come to his conclusions in the courtroom. Underlying his claims was the idea that no one could possibly reproduce all these elements, thus they identified one unique individual. He stressed that by identifying numerous idiosyncrasies in a signature, he could be certain who wrote it, although he never specified a definitive number of idiosyncrasies that would count as “enough” proof.
Other “experts” used more dubious methods. Persifor Frazer used what he called “bibliotics,” “grammapheny,” and “plassopheny” to describe how he studied documents, handwriting, and forgery, respectively. He argued that if one could measure as many known samples as possible, one could then come up with averages (of degree of slant, height of ascenders, etc.) to come up with an “ideal” signature, a composite created from numerous photographs of that person’s signed name, borrowing the method of Francis Galton, a major proponent of eugenics.
The search for the best way to identify the true, unconscious script of one unique person signaled a cultural shift in which handwriting came to be seen as the intimate expression of an individual and the signature as the symbol of the inner self’s external manifestation. However, no expert could explain why his method of determining authenticity was sound, why some marks meant something significant when others did not, why slants were considered evidence, but how far into the right-hand margin a person wrote was not. The so-called experts underwent no training, although Ames claimed in defense of his own skills that just because a man is “an artist, an engraver, or a bank-teller, does not by any means make him an adept in discovering and explaining forgery.”9
Not surprisingly, experts called on by competing parties came to differing conclusions, often insulting each other’s methods and further diminishing their credibility in the eyes of the court.10 Some judges refused to acknowledge the claims of handwriting experts in testimony. As one judge put it, comparing the science of handwriting identification to chemistry and biology: “What does the expert in handwriting profess to do? He has no scientific basis of education, experience, or laws to build on. As in this case, he simply compares one signature with others, and notes some differences, the causes of which he does not attempt to explain.” 11 Outside the courtroom, handwriting experts were often seen as pretentious windbags and were pilloried in literary sketches such as the one that has a “Mr. Grapho” take off his glasses pretentiously before describing the “convolution of the G” and “perpendicularity of that I.”
Despite this wobbly foundation, handwriting became the first example of forensics to be admissible in the courtroom, even though handwriting experts had authority only in the courtroom. Outside the courts, they had no authority. They were unlike doctors, or chemists, or other professionals with expert knowledge of their fields that could qualify them to testify in court. When handwriting experts were not testifying, they were merely teachers of italics or Spencerian, activities wholly unrelated to forensic science.
These new handwriting experts had a monopoly on their knowledge: The FBI, lacking any such professionals, would hire them. And as the science of handwriting analysis became more accepted, state crime labs started hiring questioned document specialists. By 1933 the FBI employed its own handwriting analysts in their technology laboratory.12
Thus, despite the lack of an absolute basis, handwriting verification was assumed to rest on scientific knowledge: “The notion of expertise in handwriting identification was not only taken seriously but was viewed as beyond dispute, the kind of thing that reasonable people ought not even to question.”13
Until 1993. In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, the Supreme Court decided that judges must allow only scientific testimony whose “reasoning or methodology” was “scientifically valid.” 14 Many forms of forensic evidence suddenly became potentially inadmissible—even fingerprinting. And handwriting analysis, always on shaky scientific grounds, became particularly dubious.
Katherine Schoenberger embarked on her career in forensic document examining only since the Daubert ruling, so her services have been in less demand than they would have been thirty years earlier. She does not agree with Daubert, because, she says, lawyers and judges lack the training she has. However, of the small group of licensed forensic document examiners, “it is getting us motivated to prove ourselves. It is not a subjective thing, handwriting examination.” She admits that the field gets increasingly difficult to master as new technologies are introduced. In the early 1900s experts were looking at marks made by pens with nibbed tips, which had a lot of individual characteristics—more than ballpoint pens, invented in the 1940s. Schoenberger finds writing done with ballpoint pens easier to work with than writing done with fluid ink pens, introduced in the 1960s, because “fluid ink balls up and seeps into the page.” Computer-generated documents offer other challenges.
However, according to Schoenberger, the courts are not the profession’s biggest worry. The bigger problem comes from the ranks of the many “non-reputable people out there”—graphologists of various sorts—who pass themselves off as experts. “[Graphologists] learned a different theory and feel they can translate it but they didn’t have the same training.” Most graphologists who testify in court have degrees based on correspondence courses and are focused on what Schoenberger describes as who “people really are” rather than “whether documents a and b were written by the same person.” Many lawyers do not understand the difference between graphologists and document examiners, so they hire people with graphological training to testify before judges who are similarly ignorant. Graphologists also generally charge less and can present impressive-sounding credentials, such as membership in an official-sounding group like the “National Handwriting Association.”
What counted as testimony in the nineteenth century—an eyewitness to the act of writing—does not count today. What counted in 1920—an “expert” ascertaining whether two documents were written by the same person—does not hold water in the twenty-first century, when standards of scientific methodology are too high for side-by-side comparisons to overcome. Many legal experts argue that Schoenberger’s methods are not scientifically valid, so if we agree with them and the ruling from Daubert, then it is impossible to prove one person’s handwriting, which means handwriting does not express ineluctable individuality. Now, with the things we use to write—our ink and paper and the pages underneath on the pad—a person’s handwriting can often be scientifically proven, and much of Schoenberger’s cases rest on materials. But our slants and t bars would not be upheld in a court of law.
If handwriting’s evidentiary status is in dispute, is it possible to even guess, let along prove, the authorship of computer-generated documents? In fact, computers can make deductions about the writer by considering word-processed files and e-mails, although the way they do it is not analogous to how handwriting experts evaluate handwritten evidence. Rather than noting how hard someone tends to press keys (corresponding to pressure on a page) or the pace of typing (corresponding to strokes), computers judge writing style: How the words are deployed and their algorithms can determine individuality better than handwriting experts can by analyzing linguistic patterns. The words you use leave a “thumbprint,” or script, that may be more reliable than the way you make the downward stroke on a lowercase y.
The most famous case thus far in the emergent field of digital forensics is a low-stakes, fun example of sleuthing. In 2013 a novel called The Cuckoo’s Calling was published by Mulholland Books. Rumors flew that the novel was actually authored by J. K. Rowling. Could anyone prove she wrote it?
Patrick Juola, a computer scientist, ran the novel through a program that looked at patterns in word usage, common words, word length, and “character n-grams,” or character pairs. He compared The Cuckoo’s Calling with Rowling’s previous novel, The Casual Vacancy, and concluded that those two books had more similarities to each other than The Cuckoo’s Calling did with other books.
Another computer scientist, Peter Millican, ran further tests. Millican has developed the perfectly named software program, Signature, to analyze texts by finding patterns in word use as well as punctuation, sentence length, and paragraph length. He ran the Harry Potter series through Signature and got the same results Juola did: There were many similarities between the Harry Potter books and The Cuckoo’s Calling. After the results were published, Rowling admitted authorship.15
Analyzing Rowling’s writing style, a practice called stylometrics, at first blush seems “less scientific”—a bit mushy and soft, as it were—than analysis of materials and angles. But inasmuch as it concerns the actual expression of ideas instead of fine motor skills, stylometrics attends to the ideas and expressions in writing, a contextual approach. What words are often repeated? What is the writer’s “voice”? What are her syntactical tics? Does she overly rely on the semicolon? A recent stylometric analysis of Double Falsehood, a disputed play by William Shakespeare, was proved to be partially the work of the Bard after it was run through computers, along with other known works by Shakespeare as well as those by Shakespeare contemporaries John Fletcher and Lewis Theobald—millions of words in all—to find patterns in sentence length, use of prepositions, unusual words, and other elements of each author’s “fingerprint.”
The new field of digital forensics recalls less the work of the CSI technician than the English professor. But over the past century people have developed more sophisticated forensic tools to authenticate documents only to achieve less conclusive results. Analyzing patterns of word use is not only potentially as reliable as analyzing pen strokes but arguably more interesting. Stylometrics promises to help us understand syntactical patterns, rhetorical habits, and other conceptual elements of writing.
English professors as well as librarians are also developing new ways to preserve and revive handwriting in a world in which most words are typed. Their efforts may result in a rise in the cultural and historical value of handwriting—and, as longhand drafts of novels become rarer, the financial value as well.