Writer identification using hand-printed and non-hand-printed questioned documents.

Several federal district court judges have recently referred to the purported lack of information on the proficiency of forensic document examiners (FDEs) in identifying writers of hand-printed documents. In order to provide the necessary information, we have re-analyzed data on writer identification that were collected in 1996 from 90 forensic document examiners and 34 laypersons. These data were used previously to assess the proficiency of FDEs using handwritten documents in several different types of writing.