Emoji Evidence Errors Don't Undo a Murder Conviction–People vs. Harmon
33 comments
·November 19, 2025hed
trollbridge
An obvious problem is Apple renders the firearm emoji as a water pistol, and everyone else renders it as an actual pistol.
aidenn0
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.
hamdingers
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.
madcaptenor
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
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...
debugnik
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.
pxc
All the big tech companies except Twitter now render it as a squirt gun afaik
criddell
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...
ekjhgkejhgk
Yes. I wouldn't call that emoji "tears with joy" I would calling it "laughing so much you have tears".
wongarsu
> 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
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.
gnfargbl
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.
j-bos
I thought you would if you prove your lawyer was incompetent and sue them?
Satisfy4400
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
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.
skeezyjefferson
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
lanyard-textile
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
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.
opwieurposiu
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
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.
philipallstar
Lawyers in getting paid to debate their guess of meanings of emojis shocker.
josefritzishere
The year is 2025 and the courts are debating "emoji evidence." That is where we are as a species.
ekjhgkejhgk
> he argues the court should have excluded a Facebook message that
OT: Don't use Facebook or anything by that company.
null
mindslight
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.
cryzinger
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", but I wouldn't think that's the primary use for it.
lanyard-textile
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.
qingcharles
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
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
Same with everyday language. We just got used to its nuances.
SiempreViernes
Yeah, the novel bit here is only that the lógos 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.
null
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.