Forensic Investigative and Evaluative Assessment of Handwritten X-Marks

Analysis of simple written entries can represent a challenge in the practice of forensic handwriting examiners. This article shows that valuable information can be elicited from X-marks features, in agreement with the recommendations of the ENFSI guideline for evaluative reporting. In the course of a real case encountered by the authors, an experimental study was designed to acquire structured data required to help answer the questions of the mandate. X-marks from 75 right-handed and 25 lefthanded writers were collected and classified according to their stroke sequence. The results of this empirical study were first used to assess handedness of the writer, together with a development on the risk of misleading evidence as a measure of the method performance. The results were then used to assess writership of a given person rather than an unknown person. This paper shows that following the ENFSI recommendations for evidence interpretation may require only a small dataset collected for the case needs. The procedure of evidence interpretation detailed in this paper may be followed by any examiner interested in applying a Bayesian approach on simple data collected for assessing the results of a given case, should this concern an X-mark or any other handwritten sign or letter.