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discussed below, with unpublished rulings of the admissibility
hearings. In each of these trials, testimony based on the method
was admitted without any restrictions: the expert was allowed to
state a conclusion about authorship. Since these three cases did
not involve any opposing experts, a fourth case involving an
opposition expert that settled before trial is also discussed.
In 1998, Erdman v. Osborne and Zarolia v. Osborne/Buffalo
Environmental Corp. were heard in the Circuit Court for Anne
Arundel County Maryland.^56 A Frye hearing (a.k.a. Frye-Reed
in Maryland^57 ) was conducted, and I was examined by the
attorneys and judge outside the presence of the jury. Testimony
included the investigative and experimental nature of the
syntactic method (“SynAID”) in 1998, that the method was still
being tested on a ground-truth database, and that there were
current limitations still being experimentally tested. The method
itself was described in detail and shown to follow standard
analytical methods in linguistics and computational linguistics, as
well as a common statistical procedure that was a standard
technique in author identification at the time.
The court ruled that both my syntactic method for authorship
identification and my analysis of second language interference
were admissible without restrictions. In this case, the anonymous
document could only have been written by a person in a small
pool of suspects, five engineers. Writing samples from each one
were analyzed using the syntactic method, and statistically, only
one possible author was not differentiated from the questioned
document. Also, the questioned document contained a typical
first-language interference in English as a second language, i.e.,
the nonnative use of determiners such as [a, the]. Since many
languages do not have the determiner grammatical category,
using determiners such as [a, the] in the appropriate semantic
places is difficult to do for nonnative speakers of English. It
(^56) Zarolia v. Buffalo Envtl., No. 1854 (Md. Ct. Spec. App. 1998);
Erdman v. Osborne, No. 02C95025473 (Md. Cir. Ct. 1998), appeal denied,
729 A.2d 405 (Md. 1999).
(^57) See Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1013, 1014 (D.C. Cir. 1923)
(establishing the general acceptance test used to determine the admissibility of
scientific evidence); Reed v. State, 391 A.2d 364, 391 (Md. 1978) (adopting
the test for admissibility established in Frye); see also MD. R. 5-702.