Tahnee Dewhurst
Digital and Document Evidence Branch
Victoria Police Forensic Services Department
&
Forensic Expertise Profiling Laboratory
Latrobe University
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

One of the major tasks of Forensic Document Examiners (FDE’s) in handwriting casework is to compare a population of known signatures with questioned signatures that are in dispute for the purposes of determining their authenticity. An interesting aspect of simulation (forgery) behaviour is that, even given the same model from which to copy, simulators may produce distinctly different forgeries than their simulating peers. This workshop will address the empirical research addressing whether FDEs are able to differentiate between multiple forgeries of the one signature by different writers. Participants will be invited to test their ability in regards to the examination and grouping of multiple simulations on a variety of mock cases. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss the ramifications of the results with respect to how they might best approach their decision making processes when encountering multiple forgery scenarios in casework.

Workshop duration 6 hours