Before I get started, I strongly urge everyone, regardless of how they fell about the case, to check out an interview with Clint Van Zandt at
www.blogtalkradio.com/levipage It is extremely informative. Specific attention should be paid to his take on the ransom letter.
Now, it's my turn.
Tadpole, I won't bore you with a lot of technical details, so let me put it plainly:
YES, there is a bias. Most of the document examiners I've spoken to admit that it is not an exact science. It's basically one person, one opinion. And that bias comes in when the repudiation principle is affected. In other words, most document examiners start out on the premise that the two samples were written by different people. That article about the repudiation process has helped me greatly. Now I know where that 5-point scale nonsense came from!
And yes, different examiners do have different methodologies.
Sadly, analyzing cursive writing, i.e., signatures, and analyzing handprinting are as different as night and day. I mean, on the surface, Holdon's argument seems solid, but it's a bad comparison. It has a few other problems with it, which we will see as we go along.
If ONLY it were that simple!
The fact is, document examination is not an exact science. It's not like fingerprint comparison or blood-typing. If it really WERE as simple as Holdon makes it out to be, dueling experts
would not exist, flat-out. The simple fact is you're just as likely to get a negative as a positive. It all depends on how the conclusion was reached: sample size, examination time, repudiation bias, that sort of thing. In this case, you have another problem: the writing was so heavily disguised. Let's face it, if you compare regular writing to regular writing, you'll come out one way. If you compare regular writing to disguised writing, it gets more interesting.
In all, a unanimous consensus is just about unheard of in document examination. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places, but
I have YET to find a case involving multiple document examiners where every single expert came to the same conclusion.
The second problem is that, as JMO8778 stated, the note was written with a felt-tip pen, which just about every document examiner involved with this case, regardless of where they came down on it, has said is the single WORST writing implement to do comparisons with. Especially in this case because the pen used to write the letter itself was very likely NOT used to write exemplars.
The third problem is that article from the
Times was written very early on in the case. Let's take a look at what the CBI had to say a year later:
PMPT, pb, pages 536-537: "Either way, Ubowski was prepared to say 'Patsy wrote the note.' The CBI saw this as one more missed opportunity."
PMPT, pb, page 740: "the CBI presented their evaluations of the evidence, including Chet Ubowski, the handwriting expert, who reported that Patsy could not be excluded as the writer.
He had also told his boss, Pete Mang, that his gut told him it was her handwriting."
In December of 2002, FOXNews did a piece on this case. Even though Ubowski was not interviewed directly, the reporter stated that Ubowski has said the only things that kept him from saying that it was her writing 100% were that the ink had bled so sloppily and that the letters themselves had been disguised." That meshes with what Steve Thomas wrote about him: that the methodology his group uses would not allow him to swear under oath with what he had.
And that brings me to the fourth problem. Groupthink. There are several groups of document examiners out there, with varying methodologies. To hear some people tell it, only one group has the seal of approval from US courts: the ABFDE (American Board of Forensic Document Examiners). That's not true; plenty of document examiners have been court-certified without belonging to it (including some in this case), but what you have to understand is the ABFDE has a vested interest in being the only one. Most people do not know about the amount of politicking that goes on with document analysis. Even I was not aware of it until recently. But the ABFDE has a vested interest in people believing that they're the real McCoy and that only their methodology is the correct one and everybody else is a fraud and a scam-artist. The reasons for this are fairly obvious: they don't want competition for all of those big-money government contracts. (To use a rather crude analogy, most of us pick the apple on top of the pile, right?) Document examination is a very small field. VERY small. Just about everyone knows each other. And for that reason, they very rarely challenge each other. Most of the document examiners probably did not want to challenge any of their own in court.
Now, to elaborate on this, most of the experts in this case are ABFDE members. Their conclusions are widely varying. Gideon Epstein (THE very best, from what I can gather), Larry Ziegler and Richard Williams all said that they were 100% sure PR wrote the ransom letter. Going down the scale, we have Ubowski, who was pretty sure; Leonard Speckin, who said he couldn't say she wrote it, but felt it was unlikely an intruder could have; Ed Alford, who wouldn't say one way or the other, and finally Richard Dusak, who said he had no reason to think she wrote it. (It has been noted, however, by Epstein AND OTHERS that Dusak is basically a DE in name only and does very little actual analysis).
Once you get outside the ABFDE bubble, the odds stack up very rapidly on my side of it. Trouble is, thanks to the politics and groupthink, these people are looked down upon by the ABFDE as frauds. Even Epstein was not immune to this. Even though he agreed with their findings, he said that they were essentially shooting in the dark and were not to be trusted.
Well, something must have changed his mind, because Epstein, who has always had a reputation as a maverick, is now one of the loudest voices for non-ABFDE examiners to be accepted as legit, challenging what he called the "narrow-mindedness of the profession I love so dearly."
Ah, except they DIDN'T come up empty, as I have just demonstrated.
To finish up, I offer my sincere admiration to Holdon. When he bothers to respond to a question or rebut a statement, he often does a fine job, keeping it simple and getting to the point. I expect nothing less from him.
So, Tadpole, you now heard the arguments. Who would you put your money on?
