Questioned Documents Questions and Answers

Answer: C

An ambidextrous individual is a person who writes with both hands with equal fluency.

The word comes from the Latin ambi (both) and dexter (right-handed), so it means 'right-handed on both sides'. True ambidexterity in writing is rare. It matters to document examiners because a writer able to write well with either hand can produce two different-looking hands.

Writing with the left hand only is left-handedness, writing with the feet is a special skill unrelated to the term, and a disguiser is anyone who alters his or her writing deliberately.

Answer: C

Cryptography is the science of encoding and decoding.

Cryptography (from the Greek kryptos, hidden, and graphein, to write) is the study of methods for converting information into a form that only intended readers can understand and back again. It covers encryption and decryption but also hashing, digital signatures and other ways of encoding messages, which is why the broader option is the keyed one.

The option restricting it to 'encrypt and decrypt only' is too narrow. Script writing is calligraphy or scriptwriting, and a 'chemicals library' has nothing to do with it.

Answer: A

Such a document is a holograph.

A holograph (from the Greek holos, whole, and graphein, to write) is a document written entirely in the handwriting of the person who signs it, such as a holographic will. Its handwriting can be compared throughout with the writer's known specimens.

A genuine document is simply an authentic one, however it was written. The pilcrow is the paragraph sign, and recto is the front side of a leaf, so neither describes authorship.

Answer: C

The keyed answer is freehand forgery.

A freehand forgery is written by a forger who has practised the genuine signature until it can be reproduced fluently, without tracing. A skilled freehand forgery lacks the tremor and slow, drawn strokes of a beginner's copy and keeps a natural rhythm, so it is the hardest kind to detect, and its detection relies on finer features such as proportions, pen lifts and habitual details.

Traced and lifted forgeries leave physical evidence, such as indentations, graphite or carbon guide lines and a slow, uniform line with no variation in pressure. A random forgery makes no attempt to copy the genuine form, so it is the easiest to detect.

Answer: C

The parameters are (a), (b) and (d) only: R-ratio, dye ratio and percent extraction.

As ink ages on paper it dries and its resin hardens, so it becomes less soluble in a weak solvent. Extraction-based ink-dating methods measure this with three parameters:

• R-ratio: the amount of ink extracted by a weak solvent compared with a strong one;
• percent extraction: the fraction of ink extracted in a set time;
• dye ratio: the changing ratio of the ink's dye components.

Percent sublimation (c) is not an extractability parameter, so every option containing it is wrong.

Answer: C

Such a signature is called a spurious signature.

A spurious signature is a fraudulent signature written in the forger's own style, with no attempt to imitate the genuine writer's signature. It often appears when the forger has never seen the genuine signature and relies on its not being checked. Because it does not resemble the genuine signature, it is identified by comparison, and it can sometimes be traced to the forger's own writing.

A guided signature is written with another person steadying the hand, an abnormal signature is a genuine signature affected by illness or conditions, and a fraudulently genuine signature is a genuine signature obtained by deception.

Answer: C

Laser desorption mass spectrometry (LDMS) is the method used to date an ink by tracking the degradation of certain dyes, such as the loss of ethyl groups from rhodamine B (see question 29). It reads the dye and its breakdown products directly from the ink on paper with little damage.

TLC, GC and HPLC are used to separate and compare ink dyes, and HPLC and TLC need extraction, but the key picks LDMS as the one for the age-tracking study. The method looks at how far the dye has degraded, since old ink holds more of the breakdown products than fresh ink.

Answer: A

Both statements are true. As rhodamine B in a ballpoint ink degrades, it loses its ethyl groups one at a time, and each one is replaced by a hydrogen atom, so the molecule changes into less substituted forms that can be measured to date the ink.

The options saying that either statement is false are wrong, because this de-ethylation is the observed pathway. Measuring how far this loss has gone gives the relative age of an ink entry, so the process is one of the few chemical methods that give an indication of the date of writing.

Answer: C

Parkinsonism affects handwriting. The tremor and rigidity of the disease make the writing small, shaky and cramped, a change called micrographia.

Chronic leukaemia, chronic malaria and thalassaemia are blood or infectious diseases that do not directly disturb the nervous control of the hand, so they leave no typical handwriting change. In forensic comparison of handwriting, the examiner must take such an illness into account, since a disease can change a writer's hand and might otherwise be mistaken for a sign of disguise or forgery.

Answer: D

All the features given are signs of forgery. Retouching shows patching of a stroke, connecting strokes show hesitant joins, and pen lifts appear where the writer stops mid-stroke to copy the form. A natural hand is written with a free, rapid movement.

Since each of the three is a sign, the right choice is 'All of the above', not one single feature. The examiner looks for these signs together, since a single one can occur in a genuine signature, but several of them in the one writing point to a copied, drawn hand and not a free one.