Silk Road: why dark net drugs trial has zoned in on emoticons

The trial of Ross Ulbricht, allegedly the mastermind behind the narcotics website Silk Road, has prompted an unusual debate about the importance of emoticons in court evidence.

Prosecutors at Manhattan's federal courthouse are trying to prove that Ulbricht, 30, used the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts to commit drug trafficking on the dark net site, among other crimes.

In doing so, they have been trying to show how messages from his personal email and other accounts match those of Dread Pirate Roberts.

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Ulbricht's lawyers, who deny their client is behind the pseudonym, have objected to the fact that the prosecution left out the use of a smiley face while reading aloud one of Ulbricht's messages in court.

Defence attorney Joshua Dratel argued that this could alter the perceived meaning of the message in the eyes of the jury.

Judge Katherine Forrest subsequently instructed prosecutors to tell the jury each time an emoticon appeared in a message they were reading, reports the New York Times.

Before the trial, Dratel attempted to stop the prosecution from reading out such messages altogether. He requested that chats, forum posts and emails were presented to the jury visually rather than orally.

In a letter to the judge, he said that multiple question marks, emoticons and other symbols could not be translated into speech and that inflections might distort the intentions of the author.

The judge rejected his request, but said that the jury should also read the messages and note the punctuation and emoticons.

That the defence is pushing for the inclusion of emoticons and other chat lingo is "important", says Gizmodo. "Online identity is slippery, and it'll be harder to give Ulricht's dispatches the weight the prosecution wants if they're riddled with emoticons, emojis, and punctuation that can turn a deadly serious confession into a lighthearted joke."

Ulbricht admits to setting up Silk Road as "a free-wheeling, free market site" but claims he left before it turned into a criminal venture and is now being framed by the real operators behind Dread Pirate Roberts.