Legal Definitions - test paper

A test paper is a document that has been legally established as authentic and is then presented in court. Its primary function is to serve as a reliable standard or benchmark, allowing a jury to compare it with other disputed writings to determine their authenticity. Before a jury can use a test paper for comparison, the judge must first rule that the test paper itself is genuinely what it purports to be. This initial authentication can be achieved through direct evidence, such as a witness to its creation or an admission from the party involved, or through strong circumstantial evidence.

Here are some examples of how a test paper might be used:

• Disputed Will Signature: Imagine a legal challenge to a will, where one heir claims the deceased's signature on the document is a forgery. The court might introduce a series of official bank statements, property deeds, or notarized letters that are undeniably signed by the deceased during their lifetime. These authenticated documents would serve as the test papers. A handwriting expert, or the jury directly, would then compare the signature on the disputed will against these known, genuine signatures to determine if the will's signature is authentic.

• Authenticating a Contract: In a business dispute, one company might allege that a contract presented by another party was never genuinely signed by their CEO. To resolve this, the court could admit several other contracts, internal company memos, or official correspondence that bear the undisputed, genuine signature of the CEO, all previously signed and filed in the ordinary course of business. These established documents would function as test papers. The jury, potentially with the aid of a forensic document examiner, would compare the signature on the contested contract with the signatures on these authenticated documents to assess its validity.

• Identifying the Author of an Anonymous Letter: In a criminal investigation, police might recover an anonymous threatening letter. If they have a suspect, and they also find a personal diary or a collection of letters written by the suspect, which the suspect has admitted to writing or which have been authenticated by witnesses who saw them being written over time, these would become the test papers. Handwriting analysis would then compare the unique characteristics, style, and formations of the anonymous letter to the suspect's known handwriting samples to determine if the suspect is likely the author.