Handwriting "EXPERTISE"??

This past Saturday, August 19th, the Jacksonville Daily Progress reported the "findings" of a local "handwriting expert" that John M. Karr probably is guilty of the killing of JonBenet Ramsey, based on his analysis of several of Karr's writings and the ransom note left at the scene of the crime.  (Attentive readers will also recall that at least one other handwriting expert had identified the ransom note as having come from the hand of JonBenet's mother.)  According to the story,

Local handwriting expert Don Lehew, of Mt. Selman, has obtained several samples of John M. Karr’s handwriting, as well as, a copy of the Ramsey ransom note, and according to his analysis, they are all written by the same person. Lehew compared the ransom note to an old yearbook entry by Karr and an employment application Karr filled out when applying for a teaching job.
According to Lehew, several writing features on the yearbook entry were identical to the ransom note, including the unusual curvature of Karr’s “D”s and “L”s, and the odd angle of his “S”s.
“In both samples the slant of the writing is mixed; sometimes it slants right, and sometimes it slants left,” Lehew said.

But the story gets better.  This guy, according to the story, can not only identify Karr as the author of the ransom note, but it his expert opinion (based on research, no less) that Karr's writing indicates that he is a pedophile:

“Over the last three years, by collecting samples of known pedophiles, I have created a profile, by identifying the things that are common in their handwriting,” Lehew said. “I’ve looked at writing samples from 23 or 24 known pedophiles to create this profile. I’ve been doing this research for about three years.”
According to Lehew, his profile cannot identify if a person is a pedophile, only that they possess the propensity to be or become one.
“I can’t look at someone’s handwriting and say, “That’s a pedophile.” What I can do is look at it and say, of all the handwriting samples that I have looked at, about 10,000 of them in the past 25 years, this one closely approximates and relates to the handwriting of known pedophiles.”
Based on Lehew’s pedophile profile, Karr’s writing style displays several of the hallmarks of a child molester.
“Triangles or figure eights in the lower zone, retracing, leading in from below the baseline, these are all behaviors that have been observed in convicted pedophiles,” Lehew said. “He (Karr) has the tendency — he scored high on the pedophile chart.”

And Lehew is not just some self-styled expert.  According to the story, he is a member of the American Board of Forensic Examiners and teaches questioned document courses at Handwriting University.  He has also appeared numerous times in both state and federal court and is "certified by the Department of Public Safety to teach questioned document examination to law enforcement throughout Texas."

I could add an editorial comment here, but it hardly seems worth the effort.  I will simply refer readers back to Donald Kennedy's Science editorial (see August 19th post), in which he asked whether "Forensic Science is an Oxymoron."  The answer, clearly, is sometimes yes!
-- DLF