At the trial of Ross Ulbricht, the man accused of running Silk Road, an online black market, lawyers are fighting over important evidence rules that no one ever saw coming: the use of emoji.

Ulbricht’s lawyers argued that the prosecutors omitted critical evidence from their transcriptions of his online chats. Specifically, they left out his emoji.

The New York Times reports that judge Katherine B. Forrest ruled the emoji are admissible as evidence in court. Prior to the ruling, the transcript simply said “emoticon” every time one was used.

He said “emoticon” literally every time there was an emoticon pic.twitter.com/deisI0nSEH — Sarah Jeong (@sarahjeong) January 23, 2015

Forrest said the emoticons in question were “meant to be read” and that the jury should see them. This comes after lawyers had to explain what the internet slang “IRL” meant to the jury (“in real life”), and prosecutors presented Ulbricht’s OK Cupid dating profile as evidence, in order to prove he was more drug friendly than the average user.

Maybe Ulbricht was using “;)” to denote sarcasm the whole time, and that’s just the evidence his lawyers needed. Unfortunately, official court transcripts do not show which emojis he used, so we’re left to wonder. Was he:

or:

or maybe even:

?