Exemplars and Standards: Request vs Course-of-Business Writings

The terms "request writings" and "course-of-business writings" (also called "collected writings," "natural writings," or "known standards" in different laboratory contexts) describe two fundamentally different ways of obtaining comparison material. Understanding which category is which, and what each category can and cannot prove, is the starting point for every exemplar collection decision.

Request writings (also called "requested exemplars" or "dictated exemplars") are writings produced by the person of interest specifically for comparison purposes, under conditions controlled by the investigator or examiner. The subject writes material dictated to them by the investigator, typically using a pen and paper similar to the questioned document's materials, and the session is contemporaneous (conducted shortly after the case comes to light or shortly before trial).

The strengths of request writings are their controllability: the examiner can specify exactly what text is to be written (including the specific words, letter combinations, and numerals that appear in the questioned document), can observe the writing being produced, can ensure the materials are comparable, and can obtain as many repetitions as needed. The weakness is precisely the control: an aware subject may attempt to disguise their writing or to produce writing that differs from their natural hand, knowing the purpose of the session.

Course-of-business writings are writings the person of interest produced in the normal course of their life, before the case arose, without any knowledge that the documents would be examined. They include personal letters, diary entries, business correspondence, application forms, cheques, classroom notes, contracts signed in the ordinary course of business, and any other document the writer produced in their natural writing context. In jurisdictions with extensive digital record-keeping, original handwritten annotations on printed forms, signed receipts, and handwritten fields on official forms are all course-of-business documents.

The strengths of course-of-business writings are their authenticity: they represent the writer's natural, unconcealed hand, and they capture the writer at different times, different writing conditions, and different emotional states, giving the examiner a fuller picture of natural variation. The weakness is the examiner's lack of control over what text appears, what writing materials were used, and what date the document was produced.

The SWGDOC Standards for Examination of Handwritten Items and the ENFSI Best Practice Manual for the Forensic Examination of Handwriting both recommend that the examiner use both categories where possible, treating them as complementary sources of information rather than alternatives. The quality-system requirements governing this process are covered under ISO 17025, NABL, ASCLD-LAB and proficiency testing.

Comparable text is the exemplar discipline that most directly controls the scope and reliability of the Comparison phase of ACE-V. The principle is simple: for each letter, numeral, or character type in the questioned document, there should be at least several natural repetitions of that same character in the exemplar set, in a similar writing context (cursive or print, capitalised or lowercase, at a similar position in a word).

The practical implications are demanding. A questioned document that is a handwritten letter of three paragraphs may contain all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet in both upper- and lowercase, plus numerals, punctuation, and special characters such as ampersands or quotation marks. The exemplar collection should aim to cover this full range. A common error is using exemplar sets that cover only the most frequent letters (e, t, a, o, n, r) in abundance while leaving infrequent letters (q, x, z, and numerals) with only one or two occurrences or none.

Letter frequency varies substantially across scripts. For Devanagari text, the character set is larger (12 vowels, 36 consonants, and numerous conjuncts), and the comparable-text requirement must be calibrated to the specific script and language. An examiner comparing a questioned document in Hindi must ensure that the exemplar set contains the specific akshara (syllable units) that appear in the questioned text, not just a general sample of Devanagari writing.

Comparable text also means comparable text type: if the questioned document is written in connected cursive, the examiner cannot reliably compare it to exemplars written entirely in disconnected print. The connecting strokes between letters, which are among the most individually informative features as explained in handwriting individuality and class vs individual characteristics, do not appear in print-script writing. If the questioned document contains both cursive and print passages, the exemplar set must contain both.

Special attention to key word comparisons is standard practice. If the questioned document contains specific words, phrases, or letter combinations that appear multiple times, or that are particularly distinctive for their letter combination (such as unusual digraphs or trigraphs), the examiner requests that the same words be written in the request-writing session, and searches the course-of-business writings for natural occurrences of those words.

Contemporaneity is the requirement that the exemplars used for comparison were written at approximately the same time as the questioned document. The rationale is grounded in the developmental and aging dynamics of handwriting: a writer's hand changes over the decades of their life, and comparing a document from one life stage against exemplars from a very different life stage may yield apparent differences that reflect aging rather than different authorship.

The practical standard, as stated in the SWGDOC guidelines and reflected in most laboratory SOPs, is that the ideal exemplar set contains writings from within two to three years of the questioned document's date. This is a guideline, not an absolute rule: the significance of a temporal gap depends on how old the writer was at the time and whether any major age-related or health-related changes in handwriting are known or suspected to have occurred.

Several concrete scenarios illustrate why contemporaneity matters:

A will challenged as a forgery is dated 2012. The testator died in 2022 at age 89. The estate lawyer can only locate exemplar letters from 2001, when the testator was 68. The writing of a healthy person from ages 68 to 89 can show significant change, including reduced extension-zone height, decreased pen pressure, more variable slant, and increased hesitation. An examiner who treats the 2001 letters as a direct comparison baseline for 2012 is working with a 11-year gap during which the writer was aging from 68 to 79: a period of meaningful motor change for most people.

A kidnapping ransom note must be compared against letters written by the suspect two years earlier, during a period when the suspect was in good health, versus letters written during an acute illness episode shortly before the kidnapping. The illness-period letters may look very different from the healthy letters, even from the same writer.

The CFSL, in the context of will-dispute examinations in India, routinely requests contemporaneous exemplars as the first priority and flags temporal gaps in its examination reports under the standard format for CFSL Hyderabad and CFSL Chandigarh document examination opinions. In the US, the FBI Questioned Documents Unit guidance similarly specifies that contemporaneous writings are the preferred category of exemplar. UK Forensic Access laboratory protocols identify the contemporaneous exemplar requirement as a pre-examination adequacy check.

The sufficient-quantity rule is often misunderstood as a simple minimum page count, but quantity adequacy is a function of what conclusion the examiner is trying to support, not an absolute number.

The underlying logic runs as follows. The examiner needs enough repetitions of each individual characteristic to be able to assess the writer's normal range of variation for that feature. A writer does not produce exactly the same connecting stroke on every repetition of a letter; there is natural variation in angle, length, and curvature. To determine whether the connecting stroke in the questioned document falls within the writer's natural range, the examiner needs multiple repetitions of that stroke in the exemplar set so that the range can be established.

For a conclusion at the level of "identification" on the SWGDOC scale, the examiner needs sufficient repetitions of the critical individual characteristics to be confident that the range of variation in the exemplar set is representative, not artificially narrow because of a small sample. If the exemplar set contains only 5 repetitions of the letter 'k' and they all happen to look similar, the examiner cannot tell whether the writer always writes 'k' that way or whether a more varied range would be seen across 50 repetitions. With 50 repetitions, the range is better established.

SWGDOC guidance suggests that a minimum of 20 to 30 repetitions of each significant individual characteristic is desirable for a full-scale comparison. This typically translates to three to five pages of natural writing or, for a request-writing session, at least two to three full-text passages of the relevant material written on separate occasions. The ENFSI Best Practice Manual recommends that the examiner document the quantity and coverage of the exemplar set in the case notes and state explicitly whether the set is sufficient for the conclusion offered.

The most dangerous error is not collecting too many exemplars (which is not a problem) but collecting too few and then offering a conclusion at a certainty level that the exemplar quantity does not support. An "identification" conclusion based on a single exemplar page, with limited character coverage and no course-of-business writings, is methodologically untenable and will not survive cross-examination in any well-conducted adversarial proceeding.

The legal framework for compelling handwriting exemplars is not uniform across jurisdictions, and the investigator or instructing solicitor who does not know their jurisdiction's rules may obtain exemplars by a method that makes them inadmissible, or may fail to obtain them at all when they were available.

India. Section 73 of the Indian Evidence Act 1872 (carried forward into the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam 2023) empowers a court to direct any person, including an accused, to give a specimen of their handwriting or signature for comparison with a disputed document. The admissibility framework for the subsequent opinion is covered under standards, accreditation and admissibility in QDE. The constitutional dimensions of this power were settled by the Supreme Court of India in State of Bombay v. Kathi Kalu Oghad (1961) AIR 1961 SC 1808, which held that compelling a specimen handwriting or signature does not violate the constitutional protection against self-incrimination under Article 20(3) of the Constitution of India, because the specimen is a physical characteristic rather than a testimonial communication. A magistrate may make this direction under Section 311A of the Code of Criminal Procedure 1973 (now Section 349 BNSS 2023). Course-of-business documents in the custody of a third party (a bank, an employer, a court registry) may be obtained by production order or by search warrant under the applicable procedural provisions.

United States. The foundational Supreme Court decision is Gilbert v. California, 388 US 263 (1967), which held that the taking of a handwriting exemplar from a criminal suspect does not violate the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. The Court applied the distinction drawn in Schmerber v. California (1966) between testimonial evidence (which the Fifth Amendment protects) and physical or real evidence (which it does not). Handwriting samples are physical characteristics, not testimony, and may be compelled without Fifth Amendment violation, though the Fourth Amendment's requirement for reasonable process applies. In federal practice, a grand jury subpoena or court order may require the production of handwriting samples. Course-of-business writings in third-party custody are obtained by subpoena duces tecum.

United Kingdom. Section 61A of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE 1984), inserted by the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, empowers a constable to take an impression of the footwear of a person detained at a police station. PACE 1984 contains no provision specifically compelling a handwriting sample: handwriting falls outside the statutory definitions of intimate and non-intimate samples under ss. 62 and 63, and in practice handwriting specimens are secured via the search and seizure powers under PACE 1984 or by voluntary provision. This power is available without the consent of the suspect. A sample taken under Section 61A must be used only for the purpose of the investigation for which it was taken. Course-of-business writings are obtained by search warrant under PACE 1984 s.8 or by production order under s.9 Schedule 1.

European Union. There is no single EU instrument governing handwriting exemplar collection; the powers vary by member state procedural law. Germany operates under the Strafprozessordnung (StPO), which permits the taking of handwriting samples from the accused as part of an identification examination under StPO § 81b. France operates under the Code de Procédure Pénale, with similar expert-designation procedures. Netherlands practice, frequently referenced in the ENFSI document examination literature, permits examination orders for comparison samples under the Wetboek van Strafvordering.

The failure modes in exemplar collection are well-documented in the case law and in the post-examination critique literature. The most common failures are the following.

Dictation of the exact text. A subject asked to write out the exact wording of the questioned document will sometimes produce writing that is deliberately different from their natural hand, or will write very slowly and carefully in an attempt to obscure individual characteristics. The standard practice is to dictate text that contains the same letters, words, and letter combinations as the questioned document, but not in the same word order, so the subject cannot predict exactly what comparison is being made. If the questioned document is a ransom note containing the phrase "you will never find me," the session might include the words "you," "will," "never," "find," and "me" scattered through multiple unrelated sentences.

Single-session collection. Writing varies to some extent across sessions, and a single request-writing session captures only one point in the writer's natural-variation range. Standard practice in the US, UK, and at the CFSLs in India is to obtain at least two to three separate sessions, ideally on different days, to establish the range of intra-writer variation. A single-session exemplar set that happens to capture a point at the edge of the writer's natural range may make the questioned writing appear discrepant when it falls closer to the writer's normal centre.

Wrong writing materials. A questioned document written with a fine-tipped ballpoint pen on smooth paper should be compared with exemplars produced under the same conditions. Writing with a broad felt-tip marker on rough paper produces different line quality, different pressure patterns, and different stroke endings than writing with a ballpoint on smooth paper. Where the questioned document's materials are known, the request-writing session should replicate them as closely as possible.

No contemporaneous material. Relying entirely on course-of-business writings from a decade before the questioned document, without any contemporaneous material, leaves the examiner unable to account for aging or health changes in the intervening period. The failure is most common in estate disputes, where the contested will or deed may have been executed many years before the investigation begins.

Inadequate coverage of rare characters. An examiner who reviews the exemplar set and notes that the questioned document contains several instances of the numeral "7" written in the European style (with a horizontal bar through the vertical stroke) must verify that the same character appears in the exemplars. If it does not, that feature cannot be compared, and the opinion must be qualified accordingly.

Chain-of-custody gaps in course-of-business writings. Course-of-business writings obtained from third parties (banks, employers, courts) must be documented with a complete chain of custody from their original location to the examiner's hands. If the chain of custody is broken, the documents cannot be reliably authenticated as genuine course-of-business writings, and their probative value is compromised.