Georgetown: The majority of the cases in Guyana that require the handwriting experts from Guyana Police Force’s (GPF) Crime Lab has to do with forged signatures on Wills and documents for properties in dispute.
This was revealed by the Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP), Ray Marcurius, Officer in Charge of the GPF’s crime lab. He made the disclosure on Tuesday while being interviewed on a radio programme called the “Police and You”.
The crime lab that ASP Marcurius is in charge of is located at the force’s headquarters at Eve Leary, Georgetown, and there are about 32 ranks under his supervision.
ASP Marcurius said that the Crime Lab Department is further subdivided into other departments, and one of them is the handwriting department.
He highlighted during the programme that suspected forged signatures on Wills and documents for properties in dispute, accounts for most of the cases that his handwriting experts are called in to work on.
“A lot of cases have to do with Wills and property disputes. When people die and leave something for you, you would have persons coming with Wills that they suspect has a forged signature”, ASP Marcurius said.
Other cases that require their expertise are cheques with forged signatures and other fraud related matters.
The Assistant Police Superintendent explained that the fraud department attached to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) would investigate these cases and send specimens of the suspected forged signatures and the handwriting of the person being mimicked to his department.
In determining whether the signatures were forged or not, ASP Marcurius said that the experts would study both specimens and point out the distinctive differences between them.
He explained that each person’s handwriting is unique and cannot be accurately mimicked or replicated.
“Each person’s handwriting is unique; the way they form their letters…There is a lot of different formations, and different characteristics”, the ASP stated.
He further detailed that to point the differences between the forged signature and the real person’s handwriting, his experts would look for key things, such as the sequence of letters, the depth of the pen’s impressions on a page, etc.
The senior cop pointed out that someone can never change his or her handwriting; they can only try to disguise it, but the original characteristics that are unique to them remain the same.
ASP Macurius even said that his experts can also determine if someone signed a document under duress, which means that they were forced or coerced to sign.
His experts, he said, can pick up differences in a person’s writing pace or speed when compared to their writing under normal circumstances.
However, he noted too that a person’s writing pace can also be affected by an individual’s heath or age.
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