Can Someone Actually Fool a Handwriting Expert?
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 who’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 remember a CSI episode where the coroner said, “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. How does the evidence narrate the truth? And so, yes, I guess a document examiner or any expert witness could be fooled, especially if given only a selective amount of the evidence.
Think of it like a military briefing where someone shows you only part of the map. “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 there, but the map doesn’t show all the troops.
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.” We’ve also had clients submit comparison samples that weren’t written by the subject at all. A brother’s handwriting, a neighbor’s, presented as if they were the person’s own. That’s exactly why our protocol requires us to verify the provenance of every sample.
Within our protocol, and I know that all expert witnesses work this way, for all the evidence, you have to make a judgment call on whether that evidence should be used as comparable. There’s an entire protocol in every industry to go through a procedure and the basis of opinion. Over the past several decades, professional boards and peer review bodies have developed these protocols specifically to prevent experts from being misled, cutting corners, or reaching conclusions that can’t be independently verified.
That is really the purpose of an expert witness, especially one who follows the forensic protocols: they want to be able to hand off this case to another expert whom 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, hair analysis, or a foot imprint. It’s just like the crime shows you see. It’s still a science, and there’s a protocol.
Could you fool somebody? Sure. I’m certainly not going to outline the methods here. 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 it. He absolutely submitted that false document, and I’m trying to help the truth come out.”
In practice, someone who has forged a document rarely turns around and hires an expert to examine it. The math doesn’t work, and neither does the logic. But we get clients all the time whose 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 his wife signed this. 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.”
Whether you’re an attorney vetting a client’s story or an individual who suspects fraud, the first step is always the same: find out what the evidence actually says.
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 across the US, and we help people solve million-dollar document and forgery problems. And if you have one, call us and get a consultation. We’ll find someone within your budget and someone who can help you solve your problem. We can’t promise to win your case, because it 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
https://www.instagram.com/forensichandwritingexpert
https://www.tiktok.com/@handwritingexpertsinc
