ST.

JOSEPH COLLEGE-OLONGAPO, INC

CRIMINOLOGY DEPARTMENT
Olongapo City

FORENSIC 4 : FORENSIC QUESTIONED DOCUMENT Wee 03-04

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Module/Lesson 2
(Leg. 2) : THEORIES IN DOCUMENT EXAMINATIONS
1. Identify the different Kinds of Documents
Learning Objective/s:
2. Determine the importance of documents to Man’s Life
3. Determining the Areas of Questioned Document
4. Identify the handwriting Learning Process

5. Conduct Analogy between Handwriting & Fingerprint Identification

6. Explain the Universal Handwriting Examinations

7. Give the different Theories involved in handwriting Investigation.

Time Allotment: 6 hours
Mode of Delivery Blended Instruction
1. Rosete, M.C. “Questioned Documents Examination Handbook” Great Books
References: Publishing 2009. Manila

Pre-Printed Notes/ Memory Aid/Reading

Theories in Document Examination

With the making of paper, writing became more common to many people. Criminals were
quick to learn that it was profitable to make false documents. Knowledge of the methods of making
false documents is therefore necessary to the police investigator.

The examination of questioned handwriting is an expertise that has been provided by

international policing system and local law enforcement agencies for many years. Handwriting
examination testimony has been accepted in court on a regular basis. The following are instances of
theories and principles involved in questioned document examination.

KINDS OF DOCUMENTS
Under Philippine law, the following are the four kinds of documents.
1. Public Document

Any instrument notarized by a notary public or competent public official with

solemnities required by law ( are Cacnio vs. Bens, 5 Phil. 742).

2. Official Document

Any instrument issued by the government or its agents or its officers having the
authority to do so. The officers must issue the document in the performance of their
duties.

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CHAPTER 2 THEORIES IN DOCUMENT EXAMINATIONS
 ST. JOSEPH COLLEGE-OLONGAPO, INC
CRIMINOLOGY DEPARTMENT
Olongapo City

3. Private Document

Every deed or instrument executed by a private person without the intervention of a

notary public or f any other person legally authorized, by which documents, some
disposition or agreement is proved, evidenced or set forth (U.S. vs. Orera, 11 Phil.
596).

4. Commercial Document

Any instrument executed in accordance with the Code of Commerce or any

Mercantile Law containing disposition of commercial rights or obligations.

IMPORTANCE OF DOCUMENTS
Documents record man’s life. Officially, his birth certificate signal’s his existence on
earth. Corollary thereto, his death certificate writes finish to his stay on earth. However, it is not
uncommon to note documents other than these two indicating man’s birth and death.
Man’s life does not center alone on his birth or on his death. The period between opens
for us more documents, reams of them. Take for example the doctor’s notes on the mother’s
postnatal visits with the child, the first inoculation, and subsequent visit. Consider too, the
notebooks, books report cards, excuse slips, followed by an array of diplomas from kinder
garden, primary, elementary, high school, college and perhaps post graduate courses.
The more serious love notes may become cherished documents and, not too far behind
the letter proposing marriage. Finally there is the inking of the marriage bond via the marriage
contract and certificate. This bring us back to where we started the conception, pre-natal visits,
and the birth of a new generation.
Again, life is not all schooling or marriage. Man must find work to feed his family. Thus,
we find him filling up applications for employment. He is accepted by a company that swears
him in, and he receives his appointment papers. At the end of every week or every fifteenth and
thirtieth of or cash, as the case may be. The longer he stays, the more the payrolls and paychecks.
As he goes up the ladder of success, the more papers and documents he encounters.
His memberships in the Lions or the Jaycees or the Kiwanis or the Knights of Columbus
or the Freemasonry must likewise be accomplished. He must sign this. Eventually, he receives
his pension checks after retirement. As the shadows of life finally set upon man, the final
document testifying to his demise is the death certificate.
After death, other documents follow – the last will and testament, the obituary, and
finally the tombstone with the inscribed epitaphs.
These, in a nutshell amplify the importance of documents in man’s life.

Areas of Questioned Documents Examinations

Historically, QDE has been somewhat of an inclusive profession, even to the point where
so-called pseudo-experts (in palmistry and fortune-telling) were sometimes welcome. Even today
QDE suffers from identity crisis in that at least eight (8) different, or related, areas can be
identified:

1. Questioned Document Examiners

A document examiner analyzes any questioned document and is capable of more than just
questions of authorships. He is limited only by access to laboratory equipment.
2. Historical Dating
This entails the verification of age and worth of a documents or object. It is sometimes done by a
document examiner, and can get as complicated as Carbon – 14 dating.
3. Fraud Investigators
Their work often overlaps with that of the document examiner, and focuses on the money trail
and criminal intent.

4. Paper and Ink Specialists

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CRIMINOLOGY DEPARTMENT
Olongapo City

These are public or private experts who date, type, source, and/or catalogue various types of
paper, watermarks, ink, printing/copy/fax machines, computer cartridges and the like, using
chemical methods.
5. Forgery Specialists
These are public or private experts who analyze altered, obliterated, changed, or doctored
documents and photos using infrared lighting, expensive spectrography equipment, or digital
enhancement techniques.
6. Handwriting Analysts
These are usually psychology experts who assess personality traits from handwriting samples;
also called graphologists or graphoanalysts: Forensic Stylistic focus on semantics, spelling, word
choice, syntax, and phraseology.
7. Typewriting Analysts
These are experts on the origin, make, and model used in typewritten material.
8. Computer Crime Investigators
This is an emerging group that relates to QDE through some common investigative and
testimonial procedures.

The Handwriting Learning Process

In order to appreciate the concept of handwriting identification, it is necessary to have a
basic understanding of how handwriting is acquired.
As a formal education process, a child is taught handwriting used a model of the
alphabet. He is asked to reproduce the letters within that model. This model may be in the form
of cards containing the different letters (both upper-case and lower-case).
In the contemporaneous school system, children are first taught a printed styled of
writing, sometimes referred to as manuscript writing. From here, they moved toward connected
writing style (cursive handwriting). During these early formative years, the child does not have a
handwriting of his own. There is little of anything that is individual or identifying within what is
an often clumsy attempt at reproducing copybook forms.
The product of these attempts is not handwriting per se, but a simulation of the letters of
the handwriting system being taught. In essence, the young writer is creating an artistic
representation, a drawing. The child will then gradually become more adept at remembering
what the letters look like and how they are formed. He no longer has to copy them but is now
drawing them from memory. When this occurs, the child will begin introducing variations or
deviations from the copybook form; this beginning of his own handwriting.
The mental image and ability to remember the copybook form, along with the ability to
reproduce that form, will account for other departures. The writer may see something appealing
in a friend’s writing that he would like to incorporate into his writing. The hand/eye coordination
of each child may be quite different. The manner of holding the writing instrument may vary and
the writer’s posture may be different. His perception of the letter’s formation may be quite
different from another’s.
Identification of Handwriting
Handwriting can be identified with its author, provided it contains the writing habits,
individualities and characteristics of its author, and provided further that such writing is
subjected to adequate evaluation and comparison with adequate examples of the handwriting of
its author.
As man is identified by his date of birth, height, weight, eyes, hair, complexion, built,
walk, talk, scars, mannerism, intelligence, occupation, skills, parents, associates, and other
personal characteristics, so is his handwriting identified positively or partially, in proportion to
recognizable characteristic nthat render it distinct from other handwriting.
Everyone’s handwriting is developed by the combination of common and personal
characteristics. The investigator can make a preliminary examination, which will show whether
two samples of handwriting have similar class characteristics. He will then know whether he has
enough evidence to refer the matter to a specialist.
The handwriting expert however, cannot make direct visual comparison of one sample oh
handwriting with another. He must look for the most frequent form of a letter. This requires a
study of all the different ways in which one person makes each letter.

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CRIMINOLOGY DEPARTMENT
Olongapo City

Fingerprint and Handwriting Identification: An Analogy

Handwriting, as most people are aware, can be as identifying as a fingerprint. For that
reasons, analogies are frequently made between fingerprint identifications and handwriting
identifications. However, while conceptually similar, differences between the two in examination
methodology and background are extensive.
A fingerprint does nothing on its own to change its physical appearance from
examination to examination, circumstance to circumstance. It is something that we are born with,
and, bariring injury, it will not change during a person’s lifetime. It is innate and static, There is
little that one can do to change his fingerprints.
Handwriting, on the other hand, is not an inherent trait or a process that one is born with.
It is a mechanical skill that has to be acquired through a laborious learning process. This learning
process may be in a formal situation such as a school, or within a family setting. Because it is a
learning process rather than an innate acquisition, handwriting is dynamic and lends itself to
change as a normal process.
Throughout the years, it may be superficially altered or changed by injury, health, or even
a voluntary learning process on the part of the individual.
Figure 8
How Handwriting Work
Menace on Imitation
Adjusting one’s writing impulse is disturbed when muscles become tense as a result of
extra effort to produce a good forgery. A good forgery, therefore , can only be achieved when
muscles are somewhat relaxed so that all work together in harmonious relation to each other.
Simulation as well as tracing gives attention to conspicuous features of form only, not to
the many details entering into the process of genuine writing.
Where too much attention is given to form and the process of writing itself, the
following may result:
1. The forger will find even his own handwriting difficult to write in a free natural manner: and
2. The forger will find that imitating writing successfully is much more difficult to do.
When even characteristic form is not good enough, forgery fails in the very elementary
process.
Writing that is smoothly written freely and with skill cannot be reproduced by a slow,
plodding, copying movement. Writing that is slow and hesitating as produced by interrupted
changing movement impulses is more easily imitated, for its manner of production is similar to
that of the imitation process.
Universal Principles of Handwriting Examination
1. Like must be compared.
2. Determine whether the standards are sufficient or adequate.
3. Determine whether the dates of standards are proximate to the dates of the questioned
documents.
4. Consider the conditions under which the questioned writing was executed.
5. Determine the writing instruments and paper used.
Theory of Anachronism
An anachronism (from the Greek “ava” , “against” , and “ xpovoc” ,”time”) is anything
that is temporally incongruous in the time period it was placed – that is, it seems sufficient out of
place as to be peculiar, incomprehensible, or impossible.
The items is often an object. But it may also be a verbal expression, a technology, a
philosophical ideas, a musical style, a material, a custom, or anything else closely bound to a
particular period and seemingly odd outside it.
Anachronism is something in the wrong time or place. This may mean that the forger had
trouble matching the paper, ink, or writing material to the exact date it was supposed to have
been written.
He may have used the paper that was not manufactured at the time the document was
supposed to have been written. He may have used a modern style of writing for a document that
was written many years before this of writing was taught. Some examples of anachronism are the
following:
1.Printed Heading
The printed headings of government forms and letterheads change frequently as new order are
placed. The names of the officers of the companies and the telephone numbers are frequently
different. The type from which the letters were printed may have worn out are replaced with a

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CHAPTER 2 THEORIES IN DOCUMENT EXAMINATIONS
 ST. JOSEPH COLLEGE-OLONGAPO, INC
CRIMINOLOGY DEPARTMENT
Olongapo City

slightly different type. The amount of space between the lines on a letterhead may have changed.
Careful measurement with a ruler will show this.
A good way for the investigator to detect the changes is to put the suspected documents and a
sample of the letterhead known to have been used at the date the document was prepared on the
top of each other and look at them by transmitted light. Any changes in the two letterheads will
immediately be apparent.
2.Paper
The easiest way of identifying the date of manufacture of the paper is by the watermark. This is
the brand put on the paper by the manufacturers. It is impressed into the paper by wires on the
rollers that make the paper. These designs are changed from time to time.
All paper manufacturers keeps careful records on changers in their watermaek. If the watermark
of the suspected documents and the other papers genuinely prepared at the same time is not the
same, an inquiry should be made to the paper manufacturer. Governments may have similar
special marks for paper made exclusively for government use. Wrong watermarks are one of the
most common mistakes of a forger.
3. Writing Instruments
Matching of writing instrument in questioned document comparison is essential, particularly in
suspected modification through substitution of pages in a prepared document, page of which
were signed in one time.
4. Typewriting
Nowadays, there are varieties of typewriting machines. The forger may have failed to observe
the characteristic feature of a particular machine when he attempted to alter the dates or contents
of the suspected questioned typewriting.
5. Erasures
The changing of documents by removing certain parts is very common. It is not easy however, to
do this with chemical inks. Some form of solution must be used to remove the part. Examination
by transmitted or ultraviolet light will usually reveal thinner portions of paper in the altred areas.
If the investigators suspects chemicals erasure, he should submit the document to the laboratory.
The laboratory has special chemicals and apparatus for detecting erasures.
6. Opening and Releasing of Envelopes
A common form of theft is stealing checks and money from envelopes sent to banks and business
companies. The thief substitutes pieces of paper in place of genuine checks and banknotes in
order that the loss will not be quickly discovered. The thief uses hot steam or a knife or scissors
to do this.
In repairing the damage, he cannot conceal the signs, which are detectable by magnification. The
investigator should look for signs of excess glue that the thief used to paste back the portion of
the envelope he opened.
First off Theory of Comparison
Fist-off theory of comparison is the act of setting two or more signatures in an inverted position
to weigh their identifying significance, the reason being that those we fail to see under normal
comparison may readily be seen through this procedure.
Figure 9
Fist theory of Examination

CHAPTER ACTIVITIES

1. Give the different Kinds of Documents and explain briefly.

2. Explain the importance of documents to your life.
3. Provide the areas of questioned documents and pick one or two of your choice, and why?
4. Explain the differences of Fingerprint identification and handwriting identifications.
5. Lists the Universal Principles of handwritings and try to explain according to your ideas.
6. Distinguish Theory of Anachronism and Fist-Off Theory of Comparison.

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