What’s the Straight Dope on handwriting analysis? I know that handwriting experts’ testimony can be accepted in court, so there must be something to it. But I have a hard time believing that a smart criminal wouldn’t be able to change his writing to avoid detection. On a related issue, can an “expert” really tell something about your personality from your handwriting (e.g., that loops in your g’s and y’s indicate a high sex drive)? If that were true, it would seem that one’s handwriting would change from day to day, which it doesn’t. –Kristin in Sausalito, California
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At first this question might seem like a great opportunity to lay out the difference between science and pseudoscience. On the one hand we have forensic handwriting analysis, in which an expert decides whether two or more samples were written by the same person, e.g., whether a signature was forged. On the other we have graphology, in which some sage tries to divine a subject’s personality traits from his or her handwriting. While graphology enjoys about the same prestige as palm reading, forensic handwriting analysis has helped send people to jail since the days of the Lindbergh kidnapping. But in the eyes of the law, the credibility of such analysis is on the wane. Thanks to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in the early 90s, more and more federal judges are deciding that while forensic handwriting analysis may not be quackery, it’s not exactly science either.
Sounds reasonable, eh? But Daubert created an uproar, because the dirty little secret of much so-called expert testimony was this: though it was possible in principle to test and validate most forensic techniques, in many cases no one had ever done so. In 2002 one judge even restricted testimony based on fingerprint analysis, saying he was unconvinced the technique was a science rather than a mix of craft and guesswork.
