Years ago, a young police investigating officer, Shima Stumbeko, began a long, ultimately unsuccessful battle against white collar crime ÔÇô and a simultaneous war with the country’s criminal justice system. Last week, Detective Inspector Stumbeko recounted how, sometime in 2005, acting on a tip off from undisclosed sources, members of the Security Intelligence and the Botswana Police Services (BPS) intercepted a group of middle aged men at the Ramatlabama Botswana/South Africa border gate. The suspects had unlawfully acquired weapons. The group traveling from RSA was allegedly headed to rob one of the local banks in Lobatse.
The Police on searching the suspects’ residences, found a document with drawings believed to be a plan on how the robbery would be executed. Upon reading, interpretation and analysis, by Document Examiners from the BPS, there appeared a consistent pattern to incriminate one of the suspects, a certain Kgosietsile Mokonjane.
Although there were variations in the specimen samples examined, according to Detective Inspector Stumbeko, himself a Certified Document Examiner, the variations could not have overshadowed Mokonjane’s natural characteristics, but their forensic evidence was shot down by defense counsel and the High Court Judge.
“The court acquitted Mokonjane on the basis of the variations, in spite of the evidence, because the court challenged the variations,” stated Stumbeko. The Detective further indicated that the Judge in the case ruled in favor of the defense arguing that there was no way of discounting the possibility that the writing belonged to someone else.
Mokonjane’s story is hardly unique. Scores of Botswana Police Service detectives know the pain of watching criminals walk free when they had gathered enough hand-writing evidence to put them behind bars. Some of the questions often raised by defense are; “Did you see or did you meet my client? Or are you a graphologist to be able to say why my client would do that?”
Lydia Fogarolo, an expert in Graphology says in response to these questions, “The immediate aim of forensic graphology is not personality analysis (per se) but rather identifying analysis; to define and distinguish one individual from any other individual.”
In addition, Farogolo stated that in each piece of handwriting it is always possible to identify a series of graphical peculiarities that constitute individual creative drafting in the writing behaviour.
Stumbeko concurred, “Before one can start writing, they construct what they intend to pen down in the mind, the mind in turn gives orders to the veins and the fingers, thus regulating impulse on how to drag and curve.” He added that in the course of this, there are hidden features that manifest in the pattern of their writing. These features are what is referred to as the ‘individual’s natural traits or characteristics’.
Research has shown that measuring the handwriting, subject to available specimen, has helped identify the possible author. Other things that are looked at according to forensic investigators include the length of fingers, placement of letters in the paper and the pattern of punctuation.
The most striking element and one that seems to highlight the significance of the question of genuine professional expertise is raised by Fogarolo, “These personalizing characteristics become decisive in the comparison if they correspond to particular conditions, such as for example-habitualness, that means if its casual or accidental it does not aid identification.”
Another factor that is considered is poor or modest visibility (therefore concerning details that are not comparable at first glance) and a non-simple spontaneous execution (in such a way as to be difficult to reproduce).
Furthermore, the graphological method underlines the qualitative difference that exists between the common graphical descriptions that many handwritings share, and therefore cannot be considered as significant for comparison, and those unique details, or at least original, constant, characterized by poor visibility and difficult to imitate, that have the evidence of certain identification.
Consequently, in order to be able to identify any strongly personalizing and uncontrolled graphical characteristics, that also show a percentage rarity, with certain identification of personal graphic automatisms, “only the graphologist would be best qualified to perform the task,” said Fogarolo.
The graphologist would be able to evaluate not only the number of concordances, but is also able to grasp the significance of the same and, therefore, their probative value.
In spite of this authoritative statement, the Sunday Standard can confirm that there are only five handwriting analysts for the whole country. Moreover, none of them is a professional expert in the area of graphology.
The situation is not helped by the fact that twenty four years after the inauguration of the Handwriting Analysis Unit, which falls under the Chemistry Section of the Forensic Science Services in the Botswana Police Services, criminals still walk free from the courts because of the absence of a law that covers or acknowledges forensic science, especially scientific handwriting analysis.
Recently, the issue has come into sharp focus following the growing number of white collar crime, doctoring of official documents, and high profile cases of fraud.
A clinical psychologist at the University of Botswana who declined to be named said, “The academic and professional level of the forensic analysts in the Police Services is not equal to the challenges presented by the increasingly sophisticated methods of fraud and other crimes that require handwriting analysis.”
To attest this, reference is made to a dual murder case that took place about 1997 in Mahalapye, which involved certain, Atanang Gadiwe otherwise popularly known as Rapitse. The said killer is currently serving life sentence in Prison. According to information passed to the Sunday Standard, the killer hanged his victims.
In the case of the second victim, a female, a suicide note was found in her panty. On studying and analysis of the note, it was concluded that the writing was indeed the deceased’s. But later, the murderer, Gadiwe, confessed that he forced his victim to write the note.
Police officials admit that were it not for the confession and perhaps the fact that he was the last person seen with the deceased, there is a high probability that the killer would be having a smart time out of the gallows.
One of the objects of graphology is to determine the person’s attitude, i.e. honesty, dishonesty and intelligence quotient.
For instance, they are able to determine the state of a person’s mind or their mood at the time of writing the document which is a subject of analysis. “The mandate of our unit is only to identify the author and not their character or previous criminal record,” Situmbeko said.
In one instance, which points to the extent of the seriousness of the legal obstacles that forensic investigation encounters, a one time renowned public figure was investigated for forging official documents with a view to committing fraud. The investigators then made requests for samples to be examined from all those involved in the matter and it then emerged that the said suspect was implicated by forensic evidence.
However, he was acquitted by the courts on the basis that he was not cautioned as required by law as to the intentions of the investigators.
Some prominent lawyers who faced possible conviction for fraud escaped imprisonment for the same reason. There are other issues of law and cases that reflect such, which the Police officials would not discuss for concern that they could expose them to further abuse.
Dr Baboloki Tumediso-Magora acknowledged there are challenges, but expressed confidence that things would be fine. Tumediso-Magora also confirmed that there are ongoing efforts to formulate what shall be known as the Forensic Procedures Act to take care of all the pertinent legal deficiencies.
Besides use as a diagnostic tool, and for authenticating signatures, determining erasures and validity of wills, it is believed that handwriting can also serve as a powerful art of self expression and mode of self discovery.
