LLM Group 5 Criminal Law and Criminal Administration Forensic Science and Scientific Investigation of Crime 2023 Question Paper with Solutions

What a questioned document is

A questioned document is any document whose authorship, authenticity, origin or history is in dispute. It may be a will, a cheque, an agreement, a promissory note, a suicide note, a ransom demand, an anonymous letter, a currency note, a stamp, an identity card or an examination answer book. The disputes fall into recognisable classes: whose handwriting or signature is it; has the document been altered, added to, erased or obliterated; what was written on the sheet above; when was it written and in what order were its parts written; and was the whole thing produced by the machine it purports to come from.

Step 1: receipt, marking and preservation

The examination begins as a custody exercise. The document is received in a sealed cover with a forwarding letter identifying the case, is marked with an identifying number, and is handled thereafter only with gloves or forceps and kept flat in a transparent envelope. It is never folded along new lines, never stapled or pinned, never marked in ink and never subjected to any test that consumes material until the non-destructive examinations are complete.

Step 3: collection of standards

This is the step on which the whole examination turns and the step most often botched by the investigating agency. A comparison requires standards, and standards must be adequate in quantity, contemporaneous with the questioned document, and comparable in the sense of being the same kind of writing on the same kind of surface: a disputed signature is compared with signatures, not with running handwriting.

Standards are of two kinds and both are needed. Collected or admitted standards are writings made before the dispute arose and in the ordinary course, such as bank records, official forms, letters and registers, and their advantage is that they cannot have been distorted for the purpose. Requested standards are written to dictation in the presence of the investigating officer or under the direction of a court, and their advantage is that the examiner can specify the writing instrument, the surface, the text and the number of repetitions. The weakness of requested standards is deliberate disguise, which is why they are taken repeatedly, at intervals, and with the text dictated in a varying order.

Individual characteristics are personal habits, formed unconsciously and executed automatically: line quality, which is the smoothness and rhythm of the stroke and is the single most informative feature; pen pressure and its patterned variation between upstrokes and downstrokes; pen lifts and hesitations; the manner of beginning and ending strokes; connecting strokes between letters; relative proportions of letters and of upper and lower extensions; slant; spacing between letters and words; alignment to the baseline; and the specific design of particular letters and of the personal flourishes in a signature.

Step 5: instrumental examination

The physical and chemical examination of the document is done with instruments that should be named.

The stereomicroscope examines line crossings to determine which of two intersecting strokes was written first, examines the striations left by a ballpoint, and reveals mechanical erasure by the disturbance of the paper fibres.

Step 6: comparison

The features recorded from the questioned writing are then compared with those in the standards, similarity by similarity and difference by difference. The examiner is looking for two things at once: a combination of individual characteristics that agree and cannot be explained by chance or by copying, and, equally importantly, differences that cannot be explained by natural variation.

Natural variation is the concept that decides most cases. No person signs his name twice identically. A range of variation is therefore expected, and the examiner must first establish that range from the standards. Two consequences follow. A questioned signature that falls outside the natural range is suspect. And a questioned signature that superimposes exactly on a genuine one is conclusive evidence of tracing, precisely because such identity never occurs naturally.

Step 8: report and testimony

The report sets out the material examined, the methods used, the observations, the reasoning and the conclusion, and is accompanied by charted photographic enlargements marking the corresponding characteristics, because the examiner's duty is to demonstrate the basis of his opinion and not merely to assert it. Section 45 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 makes the grounds of an opinion relevant, which is the statutory basis of that duty.

The report of the Government Examiner of Questioned Documents, the central document laboratory with offices at Shimla, established in 1906, Kolkata and Hyderabad, is worth a specific note. The Examiner is not named among the Government scientific experts listed in s.329(4) of the Sanhita, which covers the Chemical Examiner, the Chief Controller of Explosives, the Director of the Finger Print Bureau, the Director of the Haffkeine Institute, the Directors of Central and State Forensic Science Laboratories and the Serologist. He falls, if at all, within clause (g), which admits any other scientific expert specified by notification, so unless such a notification covers him his report does not have the benefit of the section and he must be called.

In Murari Lal v. State of Madhya Pradesh, (1980) 1 SCC 704, where the circumstances against the accused included writing found to be in his hand, Chinnappa Reddy J put the matter differently: there is no rule of law, nor any rule of prudence which has crystallised into a rule of law, that the opinion evidence of a handwriting expert must never be acted upon unless substantially corroborated. The approach should be one of caution, the reasons for the opinion must be carefully probed and examined, all other relevant evidence must be considered, corroboration may be sought in appropriate cases, and where the reasons are convincing and nothing reliable throws doubt on them, the uncorroborated testimony of a handwriting expert may be accepted. The reason for the caution, he said, is not that experts are unreliable witnesses but that all human judgment is fallible, and that the risk is greater where the underlying science is less perfect.

Conclusion. The analysis of a questioned document runs through eight steps: receipt and preservation with non-destructive examination first; preliminary physical examination and photography; collection of adequate, contemporaneous and comparable standards, both collected and requested, the latter compellable under s.349 of the Sanhita on the authority of Kathi Kalu Oghad; analysis of the questioned writing for class and individual characteristics before the standards are seen; instrumental examination with the stereomicroscope, the video spectral comparator, the electrostatic detection apparatus and chromatography; comparison against the range of natural variation, in which exact superimposition proves tracing; evaluation to a defined conclusion including an honest inconclusive; and a reasoned report with charted enlargements, whose grounds are made relevant by s.45.

The resulting opinion is relevant under s.39, but its weight is limited: Magan Bihari Lal treats corroboration as almost a rule of law, Murari Lal denies that any such rule exists while insisting on caution, and Pali Ram warns the court against substituting its own comparison for an expert's. The practical position is that a conviction resting on handwriting opinion alone will very rarely be allowed to stand.