Forensic Handwriting Analysis

                             Forensic Handwriting Analysis

 Well, we all are familiar what the terminology "forensic" means. Oxford Concise Dictionary defines "forensic" as relating to or denoting the application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of crime.This means it has a very important role in investigating crime and make the way to find truths. There are various ways and tools of forensic science, one of them is forensic handwriting analysis. As the title suggests, it means determining the suspect of a crime with the help of handwriting analysis. So,apart from personality development, handwriting analysis got more fields to focus.

For example:Crime scene investigators (CSI's) find a suicide note at the scene of a homicide. How do they know if the deceased is the person that wrote the note or if the note was written by somebody else?

This job is not as easy as it sounds. Here also comes the power of handwriting analysis, i have described in my previous articles about how one can analyze handwriting perfectly and all those techniques are the key-points in forensic handwriting analysis also. But some major topics i want to elaborate here too. Suicide, Murder, Homicide etc are negative personality traits.When making comparisons between two handwritten documents, a forensic handwriting analyst looks for points of consistency and points of discrepancy between the known handwriting standards and the questioned document. The forensic scientist looks for the following:

• Content--Grammar, punctuation, and diction help steer the analyst toward consistent mistakes, repeated phrases, and other hints that suggest at the author's ethnicity or educational level.
• Overall form--The shape, size, slant, proportion, and the beginning and ending strokes of the letters are an integral part of the author's overall form.
• Format and margins--The width of the margins, consistency of the spaces between words, and the slant between lines fall into this group, which encompasses the overall form and layout of the handwriting.
• Line features--Speed of writing, fluidity, and pressure of the pen used give clues about line features as well as the spacing between the letters and words and the connectivity between the letters.

Forensic handwriting analysts scrutinize all of these features when making comparisons among documents and signatures. No individual feature makes an accurate comparison, but a combination of features may allow analysts to find out whether suspect and sample writings came from the same person. Based on what they find in their examination, the forensic analyst may conclude that the documents are one of the following:

• Perfectly match
• Mostly match
• Somewhat match
• Do not match at all.

So, forensic handwriting analysis plays an important role in catching the culprit or by differencing the innocent with the actual criminal.

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