Emoji Evidence Errors Don't Undo a Murder Conviction–People vs. Harmon

Summary

Delarosa was convicted of murder. (Some background on the case). On appeal, he argues the court should have excluded a Facebook message that indicated he owned a gun a few weeks before the shooting. The Facebook message included some emojis: The law enforcement investigator who testified described the emojis as “a smiley face emoji and a devil horn emoji.” More specifically, the printed Facebook message that was admitted into evidence shows a face-with-tears-of-joy emoji and a smiling-face-with-horns emoji at the end of the message. Note that face with tears of joy [😂] has different meanings than a regular smiley [there are many variations; this is the grinning face: 😀]. Thus, the investigator’s testimony introduced avoidable ambiguity about the emojis that was potentially misleading to the jury. I believe the “devil horn” and “smiling face with horns” emojis are synonyms, but visually depicting the emojis would have been a better way to explain them. For example, my software renders the smiling face with horns as red [😈], but often the depiction is purple. The appeals court doesn’t address any possible problems with the investigator’s emoji testimony. Delarosa’s motion in limine to exclude the Facebook message included a printout of that message as an exhibit. However, in that printout, 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. Delarosa argued that the emojis shown at trial could have prompted the jury to infer that he had a “glib attitude towards gun violence.” However, the appeals court says that at the time of the motion in limine, the judge didn’t know about the emojis (they were just the unexplained rectangle symbols in the evidence presented to the judge), so the judge couldn’t have evaluated the inference that Delarosa now ...