Contemporaneity
Definition
The requirement that the exemplar set includes writings produced at approximately the same time as the questioned document, to avoid comparing writing from different life stages and attributing age-related change to different authorship.
- Field
- Questioned document exemplar collection
- Requirement
- Exemplars from approximately the same time period
- Risk avoided
- Mistaking age-related change for different authorship
- Applies to
- Both request and course-of-business writings
Common questions
Why does handwriting change enough over time to matter for contemporaneity?+
Handwriting drifts gradually with age, health, medication, and habitual changes in writing tools or posture, so a signature from twenty years before a questioned document can differ in letter formation, slant, and pressure from the same person's current writing, and an examiner unaware of the time gap could misread that natural drift as evidence of forgery.
What happens when truly contemporaneous exemplars are not available?+
The examiner works with the closest available writings in time and explicitly notes the temporal gap and its likely effect on the comparison in the report, sometimes seeking additional exemplars from intermediate dates to establish a trajectory of change rather than relying on a single distant sample.
Related terms
- Character Inventory
- The pre-collection analysis of the questioned document to identify all letters, numerals, and special characters it contains, which then governs the comparable-text...
- Comparable Text
- The requirement that the exemplar set contains multiple repetitions of each letter, numeral, and character type that appears in the questioned document,...
- Course-of-Business Writings
- Handwriting exemplars collected from writings the subject produced in the normal course of their life, before the case arose, without knowledge that...
- Gilbert V. California (1967)
- US Supreme Court decision holding that compelled handwriting exemplars do not constitute testimonial self-incrimination protected by the Fifth Amendment, because handwriting is...
- Natural Variation
- The normal within-writer fluctuation in individual features across repetitions of the same letter or writing task; an examiner assesses whether questioned-writing variation...
- PACE 1984 s.61A
- The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 provision (inserted by the Criminal Justice Act 2003) allowing a UK constable to compel a...
- Request Writings
- Handwriting exemplars produced by the person of interest specifically for comparison purposes, under conditions controlled by the investigator or examiner; also called...
- Section 73 IEA / BSA 2023
- The Indian Evidence Act 1872 provision (carried forward into the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023) empowering a court to direct any person to...
- Sufficient Quantity
- The requirement that the exemplar set contains enough repetitions of each significant individual characteristic to allow the examiner to establish the writer's...