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Document examination expert witness Ronald N. Morris is a certified forensic document examiner and in this excerpt from Submitting a Handwriting Case for Examination, he answers the question:

What is known, sample, or specimen writing?

Regardless of what it is called, this is the known and verifiable writing of an individual that is to be compared to the questioned writing to try and determine whether the writer of the known wrote the questioned writing. Known writing falls into one of the following categories:

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Chemistry expert witness Edward Funk, Ph. D., presented this short course to senior level chemical engineers on patents:

Third, the MOI should include a reasonable summary of the prior art. This gives the reviewers a warm feeling that the writer of the memo has some reasonable appreciation concerning the novelty of the invention. In many cases, the inventor knows the prior art quite well. Some arguments why the MOI isn’t obvious in light of the prior art can be very helpful to a patent committee.

Fourth, the memo should have the correct administrative details such as references to lab books and the names of the inventors. Including a colleague who did not contribute to the invention raises a flag indicating possible future problems and undermines the credibility of the MOI as a legal document. An easy reason to lower the priority; someone will need to straighten out the inventors.

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While there are many cases of child abuse each year, Shaken Baby Syndrome is a hot topic right now and child abuse experts are taking a second look at cases that put people in prison for shaking a baby. Some medical professionals and lawyers say there’s just not enough known about Shaken Baby Syndrome to make convictions.

Audrey Edmunds was accused of shaking seven month old Natalie Beard on October 16, 1995. In 1996, Edmunds was sentenced to 18 years in prison. She always maintained her innocence. The expert witnesses in her case later said the child’s symptoms could be linked to other causes. The Wisconsin District IV Court of Appeals granted Edmunds a new trial in March 2007, after she’d been incarcerated for ten years. Edmunds walked free in February of 2008 after a decade behind bars.
Excerpted from Komu.com.

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Document examination expert witness Ronald N. Morris is a certified forensic document examiner and in this excerpt from Submitting a Handwriting Case for Examination, he answers the question:

What is questioned writing?

A questioned writing is any writing written by an unknown writer whose identity must be determined. The questioned writing may consist of a single or multiple signatures, numerals, cursive, or hand printing in the form of letters, forms, etc.

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Chemistry expert witness Edward Funk, Ph. D., presented this short course to senior level chemical engineers on patents:

Scientists and engineers are taught to maintain laboratory notebooks as an important first step in the invention process. They know, but often don’t follow carefully, the rules of including a reasonable description of an experiment and the data, an idea with a diagram, or a possible new process or device. The lab book usually has some coffee stains that give some authenticity. The book is signed by a colleague who usually signs about 100 pages with a single date. More on this later, but this is the beginning, even if somewhat flawed, beginning of the invention process.

At a certain point, the scientist may decide to submit a “memo of invention” (MOI). This is the basic request to have a patent application filed. The form of this is quite different from company to company but the purpose is the same. Most companies have a patent committee of technical people, and at times a patent attorney and business people, who rate the MOI’s. Typically the rating is 1 to 5, with 5 being for important cases for immediate attention. The rating of 1 usually means “no interest to the company”-release to the inventor. Some MOIs are not rated for various political or technical reasons, and are held for review at the next meeting.

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OSHA has inspected the Cowboys indoor practice facility that collapsed Saturday and has up to six months to conclude an investigation. Summit Structures LLC of Allentown, Pa., built the $4 million facility in 2003. A Pennsylvania court ruled in 2007 that Summit was negligent in the design and construction of a membrane-covered warehouse that collapsed when a major snowstorm struck Philadelphia in 2003.

The building was constructed for the Philadelphia Regional Port Authority, which brought the lawsuit. In his ruling, Judge Allan Tereshko wrote that structure came down “under the weight of the (year’s) first significant snowfall.” Those conditions, Tereshko wrote, “would have been easily tolerated by the building had it been properly designed and constructed.” Pennsylvania-based structural engineering expert witness Charles Timbie testified that the reasons for the collapse included miscalculating how much snow the roof could hold and a failure to install the required number of “king pins.”

Excerpted from MySACowboys.com.

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Bills seeking to reform expert witness standards and prevent “venue shopping” will be heard today at a joint hearing of the Illinois General Assembly’s Senate and House Judiciary Committees. The expert witness bill would align Illinois’ expert witness qualifications with those used in the federal court systems. These rules are tighter than those the state currently applies.

Under the venue reform bill, plaintiffs would no longer be able to sue companies that do business in a county but who don’t have an office there. If the bill passed out of committee as is and became law, plaintiffs would no longer be able to sue a company in Illinois unless at least one defendant has an office or headquarters in that county. “If we are going to attract new jobs and opportunities, then we need to make reforming our legal system a priority,” said Travis Akin, executive director of Illinois Lawsuit Abuse Watch. “It is time we put the brakes on out-of-state personal injury lawyers from targeting Illinois as a great place to file their junk lawsuits.”

For more, see MadisonRecord.com.

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A military forensic expert witness testified at a recent court-martial that kits used by the military to collect evidence in sexual assault cases do not have enough equipment or the necessary paperwork for investigators. Furthermore, those using the kits might not be receiving the proper training, she said. Navy Cmdr. Lovett Robinson, senior sexual assault forensic examiner for the National Naval Medical Center, was called to testify as a sexual abuse expert witness at the recent court-martial of Sgt. Vince Jahalal.

During questioning from Jahalal’s defense attorney, Robinson testified that she believes the three pages of paperwork included in the kits don’t supply enough information on the evidence collected and circumstances surrounding the case.

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viralMeme writes that the Minnesota Supreme Court has upheld the right of drunk-driving defendants to request the source code for the breathalyzer machines used as evidence against them, but only when the defendant provides sufficient arguments to suggest that a review of the code may have an impact on the case.

Defendant Timothy Brunner “submitted a memorandum and nine exhibits to support his request for the source code,” which included testimony from a computer expert witness about the usefulness of source code in finding voting machine defects, and a report about a similar case in New Jersey where defects were found in the breathalyzer’s source code. This was enough for the Supreme Court to acknowledge that an examination of the code could “relate to Brunner’s guilt or innocence.”