A Case of Borrowing from Oneself
At trial defendant presented various promissory notes to prove the corporation in which plaintiff was his partner made no profit. The notes showed loans from defendant personally to defendant as president of the corporation which had to be repaid, leaving no net profit to share with plaintiff. The notes bore various dates. However, indentations showed they were signed all at once in a stack. Indentations are visualized by use of an electrostatic detection device, my machine being the Kinderprint Indentation Materializer. The original machine offered by Foster and Freeman is called Electrostatic Detection Device, or ESDA.
Further evidence, called trash marks, showed only one note was an original computer print, while all the others were photocopied at one time on the same photocopy machine and then dates, amounts and signatures handwritten in. "Trash marks" is a term used to cover all visible marks a copy machine leaves on the reproduction that are not on the document being copied.
The following three images show defendant's signatures from three notes that were the latest-dated in the group. Each could be identified as to its original, thus impeaching the claim of how and when the notes were signed. Note that the later dated signatures were signed on top of the earlier dated notes, while in other cases the earlier dated notes were signed on top of the later dated notes.
In each image, the signature appearing in white is the original from the document being examined, the ones in black are from documents signed on top of the one being examined. The lighter the black signature, the further up the stack its original was when signed. When an indented signature becomes too light, it is difficult to match it to its original. Being conservative in my opinions, I say "another" for such lighter indentations, although logical deduction could determine it.
When indentations from all 17 promissory notes were studied together, the exact order in which they were stacked and signed could be reconstructed and demonstrated. The exactness of the relative placement of signatures from one document to the next is consistent with their having been signed all at one sitting.