01/09/2008

News / State asks for samples of Cortez's handwriting

One of the four handwriting experts used to examine the authenticity of documents relating to President Bush’s service with the Air National Guard has surfaced in the Javier Cortez weapons trial.

U.S. Attorneys filed a motion Wednesday in the Eastern District of Texas Court in Sherman to compel Cortez to provide prosecutors with “acceptable handwriting samples.” Cortez’s attorney, Don Bailey of Sherman, filed a response that there were “known problems” with Linda James, the document examiner who tested the signature on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives form that Cortez allegedly forged to obtain a weapon used in the Truett Street murders in McKinney.

Cortez faces four federal indictments — including two counts of possession of a firearm by an unlawful user of a controlled substance and one count of making a false statement to a licensed firearms dealer for allegedly forging his brother Raul Cortez’s name on an ATF form and receipt of a firearm with an obliterated serial number, according to court documents filed in the Eastern District of Texas court.

The Cortez brothers and Eddie Williams were arrested in July 2007 in connection with the March 12, 2004, murders of Rosa Barbosa, Mark Barbosa, Austin York and Matthew Self at Rosa Barbosa’s home on Truett Street.

Acting U.S. Attorney John Ratcliffe said prosecutors need handwriting samples for “analysis, comparison and testimony by the U.S.’s witnesses.” Ratcliffe also said prosecutors need the court to compel Javier Cortez and doing so would not violate his constitutional rights to protect himself from unreasonable search and seizure or self-incrimination, according to the motion.

Ratcliffe also claimed Cortez would not provide handwriting samples “unless his counsel deems the U.S.’s expert to be qualified,” according to the motion. Bailey requested a hearing on the motion because his client “does not oppose giving exemplars to an expert … but he does oppose the Government’s use of persons who do not meet the Rule 702 standard as experts.”

He questioned James’ status as an expert in document examining, citing a separate Eastern District of Texas criminal case in which she was called to testify on signature authentication and a report that details her work as one of four sources on signature and document authentication for an investigative piece on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” on President Bush’s service in the National Guard.

Bailey claims he hired an “expert” who found James’ findings on Javier Cortez’s case were “faulty on two levels and that Mr. (Javier) Cortez had not signed his brothers’ name.” He also said this claim was reinforced by an American Board of Forensic Document Examiners certified document examiner with the Texas Department of Public Safety. Neither the expert nor the examiner are identified by name in the response.

Bailey also said he believes prosecutors have hired a new expert “named Cox from Fort Worth” who also does not qualify to serve as an expert.

“The allegations of the complaint were later dismissed by the Government because they determined through real experts that Ms. James did not know what she was doing,” Bailey wrote in the response.

James, a board certified document examiner certified by the National Association of Document Examiners and the National Questioned Document Association, confirmed by telephone that she served as a document examiner on the Javier Cortez case. She also served as one of four document examiners on the “60 Minutes” Air National Guard piece titled “For the Record” that aired on Sept. 8, 2004. She said she could not offer further comment on Bailey’s response at this time.

The “60 Minutes” piece, which alleged Bush did not show up for required National Guard duty, was later found to have included falsified records. The fallout from the piece anchored by longtime CBS News anchorman Dan Rather is widely assumed to have led to Rather’s retirement from the CBS anchor chair.

“This is still going through the court system and it would be wrong of me to discuss it here,” James said.

According to a “Report of the Independent Review Panel” written by former U.S. Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi, James was recommended to Yvonne Miller, an assistant to “60 Minutes” correspondent and producer Mary Mapes, by former Marine Col. Roger Charles, who also assisted Mapes with a previous piece on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Mapes asked James to compare signatures on two memorandums made in 1972 and 1973 in which a lieutenant colonel allegedly ordered Bush’s flight status be revoked “due to his failure to take a physical and his failure to meet TexANG standards” and declined a request to rate Bush due to his failure to attend a training session in April 1973. The second memorandum was not used in the segment, according to the report.

James told the report panel that she reviewed the document on Sept. 4, 2005, and reported back to Mapes the following day about some “potential problems” with the documents regarding the typography and a superscript “th” on the document was not in common use at the time, and that she was unable to reach a conclusion about the authenticity of the June 24, 1973, signature without more samples. The panel concluded the concerns raised by James and another document examiner should have been “vetted in detail before the segment aired.”

The panel could also not conclude if the documents obtained by CBS News were authentic or forgeries, according to the report.

Bailey also cites a U.S. 5th Court of Appeals case in which James was called but not allowed to testify in a case on behalf of the defense. The case of U.S. v. Francisco Cabrera Garza held in December 2003 involved Garza, who faced a single, multi-level count of conspiracy to distribute several narcotics including ecstasy, methamphetamine and GHB in the Eastern District of Texas. The defense called James to testify that she had examined signatures on a witness’ statement and his confession and compared them to known signatures on four other documents and concluded that the two original documents “were signed by someone other than the signer of the other four documents,” according to the appeal report.

James testified outside the presence of the jury that she examined photocopies of the documents since originals were not provided, but believed they were clear enough to use them to base her opinion. The court ruled, however, that her testimony “would not be reliable” since she did not have any prior knowledge about how many times the documents had been copied, according to the appeal report.

By Danny Gallagher, McKinney Courier-Gazette

Sources: http://www.courier-gazette.com/articles/2008/01/04/mckinney_courier-gazette/news/lnews01.txt

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