Mr. John F. Breslin

Saks was in limine motion expert for and Kam for Commonwealth; John Breslin of US Postal Inspection Service was proffered trial expert for the Commonwealth.
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Although one of the entries on which Mr. Breslin opines is hand printed, the issue of ultimate significance in the case is the authorship of signatures.
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Although Mr. Shure comes in for extended disparagement of his qualifications, the bottom line is that the court gives him and Mr. Breslin the same evaluation at *55: "Without a credible opinion from Mr. Shure as to authorship and with an inconclusive opinion about authorship by Mr. Breslin, this was deprived of any scientific testimony that could assist it in further addressing the question defendant Picerno tried to raise concerning the initials.
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Although Mr. Shure comes in for extended disparagement of his qualifications, the bottom line is that the court gives him and Mr. Breslin the same evaluation at *55: "Without a credible opinion from Mr. Shure as to authorship and with an inconclusive opinion about authorship by Mr. Breslin, this was deprived of any scientific testimony that could assist it in further addressing the question defendant Picerno tried to raise concerning the initials.

The state's expert, John F. Breslin, testified that Picerno "could not be identified as, nor limited from" being the author of the questioned initials.

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.

Saks was in limine motion expert for and Kam for Commonwealth; John Breslin of US Postal Inspection Service was proffered trial expert for the Commonwealth.
...
Although one of the entries on which Mr. Breslin opines is hand printed, the issue of ultimate significance in the case is the authorship of signatures.
...
Although Mr. Shure comes in for extended disparagement of his qualifications, the bottom line is that the court gives him and Mr. Breslin the same evaluation at *55: ,Without a credible opinion from Mr. Shure as to authorship and with an inconclusive opinion about authorship by Mr. Breslin, this was deprived of any scientific testimony that could assist it in further addressing the question defendant Picerno tried to raise concerning the initials.
...
Although Mr. Shure comes in for extended disparagement of his qualifications, the bottom line is that the court gives him and Mr. Breslin the same evaluation at *55: ,Without a credible opinion from Mr. Shure as to authorship and with an inconclusive opinion about authorship by Mr. Breslin, this was deprived of any scientific testimony that could assist it in further addressing the question defendant Picerno tried to raise concerning the initials.