Can Someone Actually Fool a Handwriting Expert?
Article By Bart Baggett
I’ve seen magicians who can make the Eiffel Tower disappear. So, I imagine with enough trickery, someone could fool a forensic expert. But I will tell you, if you hire a court-qualified expert that’s gone to court 100 times and been doing this for many, many years, it is difficult to fool somebody by simply presenting false evidence.
Now, you can lie to your lawyer, you can even lie to the judge, you can lie to the officer, and you can lie to your ex-wife, but when it comes to the evidence, generally, the evidence doesn’t lie. I saw a CSI episode, and the coroner was like, “Listen, I talk for the dead. They have no one to talk to. Like, it’s my job to speak for the dead.”
And I feel the same way. I think it’s our job as expert witnesses to speak for the documents, to speak for the decedent who created this will and testament and all this information. It’s like, how does the evidence, you know, narrate the truth? And so yes, I guess a document examiner or any expert witness could be fooled, especially by giving the expert only a selective amount of the evidence.
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So let’s just say in a military situation, you’re saying, “Hey, you should attack this side over here. Look at this map. Look at this radar. There are no troops over here.” But you know, actually, all the troops are over here, but the map you showed them doesn’t show them all the troops. That’s what it is.
I mean, you could, and people have tried to only give us selected evidence and say, “Hey, that’s all we have. We can’t find any more, blah, blah, blah.” Or they would give us evidence that’s not even written by the person. Maybe it’s their brother. Maybe it’s someone else. Say, “Oh, this is his handwriting.”
So that’s why, within our protocol, and I know that all expert witnesses speak this way, for all the evidence, you have to make a judgment call on whether that evidence should be used as comparable. And so, there’s an entire protocol in every industry to go through a procedure and the basis of opinion.
And basically, if you go through that procedure, these really smart people of the last 20 years, you know, basically boards of experts, say, “Hey, let’s put a protocol together so that experts don’t get fooled, so that we don’t take shortcuts, so that we can peer review each other and go through the same process and get the results.”
And so that is really the purpose of an expert witness, especially one that follows the forensic protocols: they want to be able to hand off this case to another expert that they don’t know and say, “I’m going to take the same evidence. I’m going to run the test and see what results I get.”
That’s what you do with DNA. That’s what you do with fingerprints. That’s what you do with hair analysis. That’s what you do with a foot imprint. It’s just like the crime shows you see. It’s still a science, and there’s a protocol.
So, could you fool somebody? Sure. But I’m not going to tell you how to do it in this video. I want to catch people who are fooling people. I want to tell my attorney clients, “Hey, your client’s lying. He’s full of crap. He absolutely submitted that false document, and he’s trying to get, you know, like, I’m trying to help the truth come out.”
And fooling people, I mean, I just don’t see anybody spending $5,000 or $10,000 and then trying to fool an expert. That’s kind of silly. Like, if you forge something, then you hire an expert? No, that usually doesn’t happen.
But we get clients all the time that, actually, attorneys say, “Hey, I’m thinking about taking this case on contingency, and I want to know if my client’s lying because he’s saying, ‘Hey, my wife signed this. I got the property, but I’m not sure I believe him.” That’s why I have dozens of attorneys coming back year after year saying, “Please help me. I need to know the truth.”
My name is Bart Baggett. If you have a forgery or a handwriting problem, we solve million-dollar forgeries. I’m not the only expert in our office. We have offices all over the US, and we help people solve million-dollar document problems and million-dollar forgery problems. And if you have one, call us and get a consultation.
We’ll find somebody in your budget, and we’ll find someone who can help you solve your problem. We can’t promise to win your case because your case may not be winnable, but we can promise to tell you the truth and let the documents speak for themselves.
Bart Baggett
The Nation’s Leading Forensic Handwriting Expert
CEO of Handwriting Experts Inc.
Forensic Document Examiner • Expert Witness • Legal Consultant
“We solve million dollar forgery cases.”
Telephone: 1-800-980-9030
YouTube: @thehandwritingexpert
LinkedIn: bartbaggett
Facebook: bartbaggett
