HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF FORENSIC DOCUMENT EXAMINATION: FROM HANDWRITING COMPARISON TO THE SCIENTIFIC EXAMINATIONS OF DOCUMENTS

Rezumat

Criminalistics emerged and developed primarily in response to the needs of criminal investigation practice and forensic expert work. Within it, forensic document science is an important field of criminalistic knowledge, whose emergence and development were driven by the need to examine documents, identify their characteristics and establish circumstances relevant to criminal proceedings. Studying the historical evolution of forensic document science reveals the gradual transformation of document examination, from early forms of handwriting comparison to complex scientific examination drawing on the achievements of scientific and technological progress. Research into the problems of forensic document science is of particular importance for improving the detection and investigation of crime, and its findings are relevant to the organisational, tactical and methodological challenges of criminal investigation and forensic expertise. In this respect, documents are both objects through which circumstances relevant to a criminal case are discovered and established, and information carriers that make it possible to determine the means and grounds by which those circumstances can be established and proved.