State expert uncertain in dispute over initials

PROVIDENCE - Robert R. Picerno "could not be identified as, nor limited from" being the author of two sets of initials whose origin is in question, a handwriting expert for the state testified in Superior Court yesterday.

Picerno's lawyer, Stephen R. Famiglietti, is trying to cast doubt on whether Picerno waived his right to a lawyer and agreed to give the state police a statement on the day of his arrest in February 2002.

Picerno, a former member of the Lincoln Planning Board who is charged with accepting bribes in exchange for his influence, testified that he remembered initialing six items on the state-police rights-waiver form, but didn't remember initialing the last two.

John F. Breslin, the handwriting expert who testified for the state, said he could draw "no definite conclusion" from his study of the rights-waiver form and handwriting samples Picerno provided.

Breslin said he uses a nine-point scale ranging from definitively identifying a given writing sample as belonging to a person, to definitively ruling out that person as the author of the sample.

Breslin said Picerno's case fell in the middle of the scale, but that he was "leaning toward" identifying Picerno as the author of sets number seven and eight.

He said there was "gross variation" even among the sets of initials Picerno acknowledged as his own. For instance, the sample sets of initials Picerno gave last month were much larger than the initials on the form, and each R in the sample initials had a flourish at its front, absent from the initials on the form.

"I have unexplainable inconsistencies that I really couldn't arrive at any conclusion with," Breslin said. "There's no solid basis for a true, complete opinion."

But he said there were similarities between the two questioned sets of initials and the samples Picerno gave. Specifically, he said the questioned sets had a "very rigid" quality that he also pointed out in some of the sample initials.

Breslin works as a forensic document examiner for the U.S. Postal Service in New York, and previously spent more than 20 years as a New York City police officer, most of those years as a document examiner for the Police Department.

The handwriting expert for the defense, Charles M. Shure, also noted yesterday that the samples Picerno gave were quite different from his writing on the rights-waiver form. However, Shure said he decided not to give the more recent samples much weight in his analysis.

"There were such significant variations that it would be of very limited value" to use the samples, Shure testified. Circumstances such as stress can affect people's handwriting greatly, he said.

And because one person's handwriting can change over time, Shure said he'd asked Picerno to try to find other documents on which he'd written his initials around the time of his arrest, but that Picerno had not given him any.

Prosecutor Alan Goulart questioned whether Picerno had purposely written his initials differently in different instances, to avoid having the initials in question identified as his own writing.

"If someone were trying to disguise his handwriting, that would account for variations, isn't that right?" Goulart asked.

"Yes, it would," Shure acknowledged.

Judge Judith C. Savage said before she rendered a decision on the hearing that concluded yesterday, she would conduct a second pre-trial hearing scheduled in Picerno's case.

That hearing is due to begin today. It will determine whether Picerno's phone conversations, wiretapped by the state police, will be allowed as evidence at trial.