[HN Gopher] Emoji evidence errors don't undo a murder conviction
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Emoji evidence errors don't undo a murder conviction
Author : hn_acker
Score : 65 points
Date : 2025-11-19 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.ericgoldman.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.ericgoldman.org)
| hed wrote:
| It's interesting because like the article says legal teams may
| have to get smarter about recreating all the context when
| evidence like this is used. Even if the emojis rendered the
| reference implementation of Unicode and what vendors actually
| represent can vary quite a bit by platform or OS version.
| criddell wrote:
| I recently listened to some podcast where they talked about
| this in the context of threatening texts. Sending someone a gun
| emoji communicates a very different thing if it shows up as a
| water pistol vs a realistic looking gun. The court need to see
| what the sender thought they were sending and what the receiver
| saw.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/k1xxio/evolutio...
| trollbridge wrote:
| An obvious problem is Apple renders the firearm emoji as a
| water pistol, and everyone else renders it as an actual pistol.
| debugnik wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, now Apple, Google, Microsoft,
| Samsung, WhatsApp and Facebook all use a water pistol. X was
| the only platform to roll that back.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Also IIRC there are some renderings where the firearm is
| aimed to the left and others aim it to the right. I'm having
| trouble sourcing this though - maybe this was true in the
| past or it was some other emoji that implies a direction.
| internetter wrote:
| All vendor's guns have always aimed at the left, however
| there _are_ plenty of discrepancies, collectively referred
| to as "emoji fragmentation"
|
| https://blog.emojipedia.org/2018-the-year-of-emoji-
| convergen...
| microtherion wrote:
| Theoretically, there's a mechanism in Unicode allowing you
| to aim left and right:
| https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Direction
|
| But I don't think it's implemented widely, if anywhere.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Android changed in 2018 -- which adds even _more_ of an issue
| since serious cases can take many years to go to trial, what
| it looks like on a phone today might be totally different
| than what it looked like on a phone at the time of the crime.
| pxc wrote:
| All the big tech companies except Twitter now render it as a
| squirt gun afaik
| hamdingers wrote:
| Almost everyone renders a water pistol now:
| https://emojipedia.org/pistol (click the "designs" tab)
|
| Twitter/X is the only major exception, and they only changed
| it to represent a realistic gun recently.
| derefr wrote:
| Interestingly, this seems to be a pattern -- in cases where
| the other providers are depicting an emoji "per the spec"
| but one provider is doing something unusual, the unusual
| depiction almost always spreads to fixation among the other
| providers.
|
| For example, "loudly crying face"
| (https://emojipedia.org/loudly-crying-face) was literally
| supposed to just be a kind of mouth-open bawling
| expression. And that's how everyone did it... except Apple.
| Apple gave their version a weirdly mixed expression that
| people sometimes interpret as "crying while laughing
| because something is so funny" (even though there's already
| a separate emoji for that.) And iOS users kept using this
| emoji to mean that, while everyone else was confused. But
| instead of Apple fixing their emoji, everyone else
| gradually changed their depictions to conform to Apple's
| non-standard interpretation. (Seriously, look at the
| history for each provider in the above link.)
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I dunno, the SoftBank emoji from 25 years ago is pretty
| much the same face as Apple's is now.
|
| https://emojipedia.org/softbank/2000/loudly-crying-face
| doublerabbit wrote:
| "The SoftBank emoji designs heavily influenced Apple's
| original emoji font which was designed to be compatible
| with this set when launching in Japan, due to iPhone
| being a SoftBank-exclusive phone when first released."
|
| Would be why.
| linkregister wrote:
| > Apple gave their version a weirdly mixed expression
| that people sometimes interpret as "crying while laughing
| because something is so funny" (even though there's
| already a separate emoji for that.) And iOS users kept
| using this emoji to mean that, while everyone else was
| confused.
|
| This sounds like a small social media niche being
| interpreted as representative overall. The first 10
| search engine results were people primarily interpreting
| it as a crying/sadness emotion; some used it as an
| expression of general intense emotion. This seems
| consistent with actual crying, which can be a reaction to
| many different intense emotions, not just sadness.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| In a criminal defense scenario you should take into
| account how the sender sees it, potentially how the
| recipient sees it, and whether the sender was aware the
| recipient would see it differently.
| linkregister wrote:
| The case in question does not hinge upon the crying
| emoji. This was a tangential discussion.
| derefr wrote:
| I mean, it _is_ how my own SO sees /understands this
| emoji (despite my insistence that that's not "what it
| means.") I just found out that she uses this emoji that
| way a few days ago, and then this article reminded me of
| that.
|
| But I didn't mean to argue from social proof. Rather the
| opposite!
|
| My argument was more--how else should you read the actual
| evidence? That evidence being that all the other
| providers' emojis started off depicting an "anguished"
| down-turned mouth and scrunched eyebrows; but that all of
| them then gradually reworked their depictions to instead
| include a neutral 'O' mouth and raised eyebrows, which
| removes the signifiers of anguish from the expression.
|
| Why else would they all do that, except to cohere with
| the expectations of users who somehow communicated to
| them that they expected the emoji's expression to _not_
| be read as "anguished"?
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| What is it these days that perfectly normal words and things
| get censored? As far as harmful social phenomena go this is
| very small, but it's so silly.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Because there's a concerted effort to "denormalize" and
| stigmatize the perfectly legitimate activity of owning a
| firearm for lawful purposes like hunting, collecting, and
| sport shooting.
|
| Just one more front in the culture wars.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| I don't agree. It's more like an extreme fear of causing
| offence, which is one of the greatest crimes any public
| official or company can commit in todays day and age.
|
| You can definitely fit it in to the ongoing war against
| culture, but you are reaching a bit.
|
| I can't even blame Big Tech for it. It probably makes
| them more profit to be proactively timid. When that stops
| being true so will they.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| Yes. I wouldn't call that emoji "tears with joy" I would
| calling it "laughing so much you have tears".
| chuckadams wrote:
| To say nothing of the eyes and smile on U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO
| which kind of made it more disturbing.
| mindslight wrote:
| The issues with emojis go much deeper than this. Even if we agree
| on how exactly they displayed, their social meaning is highly
| dependent on the context of a conversation. Instead of allowing
| outside investigators to divine their own meanings and introduce
| them as evidence, courts should insist on testimony from the
| person or people those communications were meant for. If said
| people give wildly differing testimony to what investigators
| think is truthful, then they can go down the rabbit hole of how
| the codepoints were displayed and whatnot.
| qingcharles wrote:
| One tricky aspect of this is if the messages are from the
| defendant then the defendant is almost certainly going to use
| their right not to testify (especially if they are actually
| guilty) as they'll be asked all sorts of other difficult
| questions they likely won't want to answer.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The state has been using this trick since forever. They don't
| even need to have written correspondance to misconstrue, they
| do it all the time with just testimony.
| postexitus wrote:
| Same with everyday language. We just got used to its nuances.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Yeah, the novel bit here is _only_ that the logos displayed
| to the different parties can be materially different for
| technical reasons unrelated to the intent of either party.
| The rest is bog-standard ambiguity of language.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Exactly. For example, there's an enormous difference between
| someone saying "I'd like to choke that guy" in exasperation,
| and someone saying "I'd like to choke that guy" while
| discussing the weekend's plans with their friends. People say
| exaggerated things all the time and it's generally understood
| as not expressing their genuine intent.
|
| A popular cultural example: "I shot the clerk?".
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SbI_lGPahg
| WalterBright wrote:
| > exactly
|
| There are many different words that have different shades
| of meaning. For example, bird, duck, pigeon. None of that
| works with emojis.
| cryzinger wrote:
| Google's "Messages" client on Android has a feature where, in
| RCS chats, if you send or receive a message that solely
| consists of a single applicable emoji (and I believe in
| response to certain emoji reacts as well?), a little animation
| plays. The :joy: and related emojis trigger a "haha so
| funny"-type animation, :cry: and similar trigger a sad, rainy
| cloud, and so on.
|
| An interesting thing I noticed recently is that :skull:
| triggers the same "haha so funny" animation as :joy: does!
| Which kind of surprised me, because I _was_ using the skull to
| convey "lol I'm dead", so it fit here, but I wouldn't think
| that's the primary use for it.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Because "lol I'm dead = something is hilarious = :joy:".
| "Emoji evidence" is crazy. :skull: can mean a million other
| things, same with a (water) pistol emoji.
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| Theoretically this is probably where good jury selection comes
| in.
|
| If a juror is presented a message with an explanation that is
| obviously "out of touch" with its intended meaning, the juror
| loses some trust and applies more scrutiny.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Lawyers in getting paid to debate their guess of meanings of
| emojis shocker.
| ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
| > he argues the court should have excluded a Facebook message
| that
|
| OT: Don't use Facebook or anything by that company.
| wongarsu wrote:
| > instead of being followed by two emojis, the message is
| followed by four closely-spaced rectangles. Neither the text of
| Delarosa's in limine motion, nor anything said during the in
| limine hearing would have informed the trial court that the four
| rectangles represented two emojis
|
| So I know nothing about this trial and have limited knowledge of
| the US legal system, but didn't one party just misrepresent
| evidence here? They would probably argue that it wasn't
| intentional and thus not perjury, but it still sounds pretty
| serious. The emojis are just as much part of the message as the
| latin characters
| aidenn0 wrote:
| If I understand TFA right, it was the _defense_ that made the
| mistake, which is why the appeal failed. You don 't get a do-
| over when the mistake is on your side.
| j-bos wrote:
| I thought you would if you prove your lawyer was incompetent
| and sue them?
| Satisfy4400 wrote:
| The defendant could raise an "ineffective assistance of
| counsel" argument, asserting his counsel was incompetent
| and it prejudiced him. You can make that claim in your
| direct appeal, but for procedural reasons, defendants
| usually make them in separate petitions for writs of habeas
| corpus. That's not a lawsuit against the lawyer, though.
| Instead, it's a lawsuit seeking your freedom from the
| state.
| gizmo686 wrote:
| Ineffective assistance of counsel is a thing (and does not
| require suing the lawyer).
|
| However, failing to properly object to how some emojis were
| entered into evidence is no where near the standard of
| being ineffective.
| kstrauser wrote:
| IANAL, but I can imagine the prosecutor's pushback on
| that: "at what point did you attempt to straighten out
| your own lawyer about their misinterpretation of your
| evidence? Can you point us to the line in the transcript
| where you tried to explain the correct interpretation in
| court?"
|
| Like, if my life was on the line, and my lawyer was
| screwing up my evidence, I think I'd try to point that
| out to someone.
| YouAreMammon wrote:
| Thank god that isn't the bar for ineffective assistance
| of counsel.
|
| A vast majority of defendants don't know all the ins and
| outs of law... that's why we have a profession to deal in
| this domain. Asking the average defendant to check their
| counsel's work is ridiculous.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I disagree. Clients shouldn't be expected to know the ins
| and outs of legal procedure and rules of evidence and a
| million other things like that. I think they should be
| reasonable expected to say something when their attorney
| is making factual mistakes, like "when my client wrote
| this, they meant...", when the client knows that's not at
| all what they meant.
|
| To give an example that might resonate to HN folks,
| suppose your attorney says "I know my client had a bunch
| of hacking tools on his computer, and that looks bad".
| Now suppose the laptop in question is your work-issues
| computer, and you work in pen testing, so you possess all
| of those for legitimate work-related reasons. I think
| it'd be hard to appeal on those grounds. "My attorney
| should have said something?" "You just sat there and went
| along with it, though." Appeals aren't meant to be an
| infinite series of do-overs were you get to relitigate
| every single thing you wish you'd said differently.
|
| If your attorney messes up on legal issues, that's on
| them. When they mess up on the basic facts, and you don't
| say anything about it, I think that's kind of on you.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| If I understand TFA then the defendant is arguing that his
| message about owning a gun was made _less_ glib by the
| verbatim inclusion of a tears-of-joy emoji plus a smiling-
| devil-horns emoji at the end.
|
| That is... an unusual argument to make.
| opwieurposiu wrote:
| I have noticed that men and women tend to use different emoji and
| ascribe different meaning to them. Ex. I see the skull emoji used
| to indicate laughter more often used by women and crying face
| used more by men.
|
| There are some tribes where men and women have completely
| different languages, I wonder if we will end up that way with
| emojis.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| I used to use the :-P emoji on AIM as sort of "that was a joke"
| emoji, and if I had a nickel for every girl who thought I was
| flirting with them for using it, I'd have 3 nickels. Not a lot
| but still weird it happened 3 times. Also how I got my first
| girlfriend. I wasn't flirting, but she seemed to like what I
| was doing it so I figured let's give it a shot.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Try changing ":" to ";" and that number is going to get
| increased by quite a lot. :D
| WalterBright wrote:
| > men and women tend to use different emoji
|
| I went through a brief emoji phase where I had to scroll
| through a large list of emoji to find just the right one. I
| eventually realized this was just stupid and use words now.
| WalterBright wrote:
| As an aside, I dislike the juvenile Apple renderings. They
| look like stickers that come on sheets you'd give a second
| grader.
| burkaman wrote:
| I think you're talking about
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubang_language
|
| It does actually seem very applicable here - it's not two
| different languages, but there's a seemingly random subset of
| words in the language that have completely different male and
| female versions. If emojis are part of the language, and men
| and women use different ones to refer to the same concepts,
| that's basically the same thing.
| lanyard-textile wrote:
| Given it was not directly brought up in the motion in limine, it
| sounds like there were other concerns with the message anyway?
|
| > it's possible/probable that the trial outcomes would have been
| the same with or without the Facebook message evidence.
| Satisfy4400 wrote:
| It seems like defense counsel was primarily concerned that the
| message indicated the defendant owned/possessed a gun. The
| emoji argument seems to be a secondary concern that he raised
| only on appeal.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| The year is 2025 and the courts are debating "emoji evidence."
| That is where we are as a species.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand this comment. Emojis are a form of
| communication. Communications can and are evidence used in
| court. If someone drew pictures related to guns, and then was
| accused of a gun crime, that evidence would be used. If someone
| communicated non-verbally to someone by drawing their finger
| across their throat and then pointing at the person, who later
| alleged they were attacked by that person, that would be
| evidence. Emojis are simplified pictograms used as shorthand to
| communicate, like acronyms or initialisms are simplified
| representations of multiple words, like someone saying "RIP to
| you for what you did" could be a threat.
|
| If someone sent an email threatening someone else, the court
| should not present that email incorrectly as raw HTML code. If
| a WhatsApp message was sent with text bolded for emphasis, it
| shouldn't be shown to the jury in plain text. So I don't
| understand this derisive attitude towards "emoji evidence."
| toast0 wrote:
| > If someone sent an email threatening someone else, the
| court should not present that email incorrectly as raw HTML
| code.
|
| If there was no text/plain alternative, showing the HTML
| would be acceptable evidence of their crime. Sentencing
| guidelines for sending mail without a text/plain alternatives
| aren't established, but I think 1 year for the user and 10
| years for the software developer is fair.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| I am just despairing the state of the species. We're
| communicating through comic pictograms like we're reverting
| to a neolithic state.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Pictographic communication continued into, and separately
| came about, far more recently than the neolithic era. And
| history isn't a linear movement of only progress. There is
| no obvious reason to think the pictographic communication
| is a degradation of communication.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > There is no obvious reason to think the pictographic
| communication is a degradation of communication.
|
| Phonetic alphabets evolved from pictograms, not the other
| way around. For example, A is an upside down bull's head.
|
| Pictograms are definitely a degradation.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Why is using alphabets _and_ pictograms a degradation?
| Explained in a way that is something other than
| "pictograms were used long ago so they are bad".
|
| It also seems that the assumption is that alphabets were
| an improvement _in every way_. Why is this a given?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Because you cannot look up a pictogram to divine its
| meaning. There are a million words in English. You can
| trivially look any of them up.
|
| > "pictograms were used long ago so they are bad"
|
| Please don't put words in my mouth that I never wrote.
|
| Pictograms evolved into phonetic alphabets over and over
| in history, because phonetic alphabets are objectively
| better.
|
| Take a chapter from "Lord of the Rings" and redo it with
| pictograms. Good luck with that.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| How is using comic pictograms as one of the many ways we
| communicate some sort of reversion? We use different
| vocabularies when talking to different audiences, for
| instance I speak much more casually with friends than with
| my boss. We often specifically use vocabulary and word
| choice to provide context to the nature of the
| conversation. Like using formal and respectful wording to
| highlight professionalism, or using casual slang to
| highlight a joking or lighthearted tone.
|
| As we have moved more informal conversations to written
| form (texting everyday with friends is a lot more casual
| than sending paper letter correspondence through the mail
| to friends), we have added ways to provide tonal context
| that is lost by not hearing someone's voice or seeing their
| body language. Adding "LOL" or "haha" to indicate your
| statement is meant to be a joking tone, for instance.
| Emojis are just another way to do that and to reinforce the
| casual nature of the communication. Someone might use the
| turtle emoji when messaging their girlfriend about how long
| they have been waiting in line to give the message a cute
| playful tone, where they wouldn't use it when talking about
| a production slowdown in a message to their coworkers.
|
| Its fine not to like emojis, but it is eyerollingly
| pretentious to act like it is some indication of the de-
| evolution of society.
| skeezyjefferson wrote:
| i love how after having actual law professionals take a look at
| his appraisal, he has to retract all the things he said about
| law, leaving you with how he noticed emjois werent rendered on a
| printout. typical internet know nothing
| layer8 wrote:
| As a side note, the FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY emoji doesn't actually
| depict tears of joy, but laughing so hard that tears come out of
| your eyes.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Try LOL instead.
| layer8 wrote:
| LOL isn't quite the same.
| WalterBright wrote:
| How is it different?
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| In the same vein was an incident where an improperly localized
| phone in Turkey caused a sent message to arrive with different
| characters, with very different meaning, and the fallout was two
| deaths [1], discussed here [2]
|
| [1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9900758
| fusslo wrote:
| > There are several lessons to take away from this tragedy. One
| is that localization is a good thing. Another is that it is
| best not to kill people who make you angry until you have
| carefully investigated the situation
|
| wise wise words
| shkkmo wrote:
| The person that was killed was the person who started the
| violence, the wife. I would posit that instead physically
| attacking someone who comes over to apologize, you should try
| listening first.
|
| Also, if your wife and her family are that crazy, give them
| time to cool down before you put yourself in that
| situation...
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| the father was the one who stirred the pot and
| misinterpreted the text -- blame him.
|
| and this was an _estranged_ wife, which sometimes leads to
| murders in the US and other places. they were looking for a
| reason to be pissed at him.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Illustrating another facet of problems with emojis and icons. For
| example, an image of a duck. Is it meant to be a duck, a goose, a
| pigeon, or a bird? Don't you love that ancient oil lamp icon that
| is supposed to mean "oil pressure"? Unlike words, you cannot even
| look up the definition of an emoji or icon.
|
| Icon based written languages have been replaced over time with
| phonetic ones. There's a good reason for that. Icons and emoji
| don't work.
|
| Constantly inventing new ones and adding them to Unicode is
| simply retarded.
|
| There, I said it!!
| Scott-David wrote:
| While emoji evidence can be intriguing, it's not strong enough to
| overturn serious convictions--context and corroborating evidence
| always matter most in legal cases.
| notfed wrote:
| > For example, my software renders the smiling face with horns as
| red [], but often the depiction is purple.
|
| It seems the article is ironically falling for the same problem.
| This would be worked around by including images of the emoji
| variants, rather than relying on Unicode.
| john-carter wrote:
| While emoji interpretations can be tricky, they don't override
| solid legal evidence in serious cases like murder convictions.
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