Trust as an Axiological Determinant of the Process of Proving in Criminal Cases: Emojis as an Object of the Court’s Assessment

The growth of external and internal threats to Russian statehood poses an urgent question of the effectiveness of legal regulators of public relations and their sufficiency. From this standpoint, the questions of faith and trust become especially relevant, among other things, in the sphere of criminal procedure law that can be systematized by levels and objects. Conditionally, it is possible to single out levels of vertical and horizontal trust that influence criminal proceedings: vertical trust is an indicator of the legitimacy of authorities and state institutions, while horizontal trust is characterized by a versatile orientation regarding the other subject, the participant of public relations, as well as the object. A rapidly growing influence of new means of communication on the transformation of the process of proving has made it necessary to assess emoji as proof in criminal cases. In the process of assessment the subject of of proving uses the rules of semiosis, i.e. interprets the meaning of an emoji in three key domains: the syntax of emojis (the ability of an emoji to independently represent an emotion or an object), the semantics of emojis (the emotional component of the meaning conveyed by an emoji), and the pragmatics of emojis (states the ability of the latter to specify and interpret the meaning of the message, signify membership in a certain group or community, reflect cultural, social and personal specifics). Currently, the court practice is lacking a unified method of interpreting the meaning of emojis, which leads to difficulties of their assessment. For example, difficulties of descriptive nature, i.e. how emojis should be reflected in the text of a court act. As the court practice of appealing to emojis, their interpretations by the subjects of law enforcement, and their assessment alongside other information constituting the circumstances of the case that should be proven are becoming more widespread, it is necessary to draw the attention of scholars to this phenomenon and work out unified scientifically grounded approaches to using the rules of semiosis in the process of proving in criminal cases.