le had attached."

The panel was silent. Trenchant addressed them. "When I was first
charged with writing these critiques, I spoke to a few professional
document examiners. Right off, I discovered that I could not afford to
hire one to do an unbiased analysis. However, they usually were
willing to answer general questions on the phone for a small consulting
fee.

"In talking with them and reading the material they suggested to me, I
came away with some interesting information. None that I talked to
felt they were infallible or claimed that handwriting was as unique as
fingerprints, but they enjoyed the benefits of that illusion.

"Both tape recordings and polygraph (lie detector) evidence is not
allowed in courts. The so-called expert testimony of doctors,
psychiatrists, as well as various technical expertise such as
fingerprint and document analysis is. Deus ex machina is evidently not
looked highly upon by judges, possibly because they allow no other gods
before them in their courtrooms.

"Court certification of a document examiner means that the court has
accepted their training and experience. This is seldom checked and is
fairly loosely defined by the profession itself. It does not indicate
a perfect batting average for the examiner.

"Most analysts that I contacted said that if they were hired in this
case, they would want to examine all of the critiques--not just the
handful picked out by NERD. There is always the chance of there being
another individual with similar handwriting in that many samples.

"They admitted there were people capable of forging the handwriting of
another person. They directed me to check out the literature on the
Hitler Diaries and the more recent White Salamander Papers. What these
two cases had in common was that the best, most expert document
examiners in the world were fooled. Because these were sensational
cases, they were highly publicized. Most forgeries get little or no
attention from the media but the fact remains that a good forger can
fool highly qualified document examiners.

"Oh, yes. There is one more thing I want to question here since most
of the documents you have listed as so-called standards are copies.
These copies are mostly memos addressed to people in the department.
If they are authentic, why aren't they originals? If I had written and
sent those, it would have been the originals--if I'd made a copy it
would have been kept for my files."