Criminalist Julie Sandel is investigating a series of threatening notes written in pencil and sent to a local politician. A suspect is arrested and Julie directs the suspect to prepare writing samples to compare to the writing on the notes. She has the suspect sit at a desk in an empty office and gives him a pen and a piece of paper. She begins to read one of the notes and asks the suspect to write the words she dictates. After reading about half a page, she stops, then dictates the same part of the note a second time for the suspect. At one point, the suspect indicates that he does not know how to spell one of the words, so Julie spells it for him. After completing the task, Julie takes the origi- nal notes and the dictated writing from the suspect to a document examiner. What mistakes, if any, did Julie make?

It is true that handwriting can be deduced by comparing a suspects's handwriting to the questioned document, however Julie made a mistake by not making the suspect to write many pages. The suspect may intentionally decide to change his/her hand writing. This trick can be neutralized by asking the suspect to write several pages.

Secondly, the suspect ought to have been given a pencil and paper similar to the one used to write the threatening document. Rather, Julie gave the suspect a pen.

Thirdly, the suspect only wrote half a page instead of a full page. Secondly, Julie took only two exemplars when she should have taken more.

She should not have dictated the spelling of any word to the suspect. The examiner is not supposed to do that.

The threatening documents should have first been shown to the document examiner before taking the exemplars.