A Blind Study on the Reliability of Hand Printing Identification by Forensic Document Examiners

Recent court cases involving that hand printing, specifically block letters, have surfaced in the news and among the forensic document examiner community. (United States of America v. Gerald Johnsted, 2013, Florida v. Jesse Lee Miller, 2014) Moreover, the current trend in elementary education is away from cursive instruction so it is likely that printing will become even more commonly used in every day writing. It is very frequently seen in forms, addresses and work-related communications as well. As a result, it has become increasingly important to verify for the purposes of a Daubert Challenge that forensic examination of hand printed documents by qualified Forensic Document Examiners (FDE) is reliable.
This study was undertaken in partial response to a court opinion, citing a lack of supporting research in the area of hand printing. It is the purpose of this research to test two hypotheses:
The qualified FDE can very reliably identify block letter hand printing (ALL CAP).
The qualified FDE can do so using the same methods and protocols as in the identification of cursive handwriting.
Each of fifty-three (53) qualified FDE participants was provided with a study packet intended to reflect evidence and procedures similar to normal bench work in a condensed form. Twenty-five (25) questioned writings were offered in individual “case packets.” Each case included sample writings of three potential “suspects.” Participants were asked to opine (on a nine-point scale) whether or not each suspect was the writer.
The compiled data clearly supports both of the hypotheses; (1) that qualified FDE’s reliability rate with only 2.28% of calls inaccurate, when identifying (or excluding) a writer of block hand printing, and (2) that qualified FDE’s do so using the same methods and protocols as in the identification of cursive handwriting.