Is Reading Spouse's E-Mail a Crime?

Hugh Pickens writes "The Detroit Free Press reports that Leon Walker is charged with unlawfully reading the e-mail of Ciara Walker, his wife at that time, which showed she was having an affair with her second husband, who once had been arrested for beating her in front of her son. Walker says he gave the e-mails to her first husband, the child's father, to protect the boy. 'I was doing what I had to do,' says Walker. 'We're talking about putting a child in danger.' Now prosecutors, relying on a Michigan statute typically used to prosecute crimes such as identity theft or stealing trade secrets, have charged Leon Walker with a felony for logging onto a laptop in the home he shared with his wife. Prosecutor Jessica Cooper defended her decision to charge Walker. 'The guy is a hacker,' says Cooper, adding that the Gmail account 'was password protected, he had wonderful skills, and was highly trained. Then he downloaded [the emails] and used them in a very contentious way.'"

Comments

Re:Is opening a spouses mail a crime?

[vlm]

Letter of the law? I believe so.

However, in practice, though mail addressed to you may have your name on it, it's the address that's important. As long as you live at that address, you can open that mail.

Err, not exactly. Slashdot-lawyering is always fun to watch.

http://www.ehow.com/about_6293417_federal-mail-not-addressed-you_.html

In grotesque summary of a website's summary at the federal level "The statute is essentially about stealing mail from the Post Office.". In other words the feds pretty much don't care as long as there are no post office employees or post office property directly involved.

In the computer world that we live in, we all know and understand there is a desperate goal to re-legislate all our crimes with the words "on a computer" suffixed at great expense and publicity, etc. But in the real physical world, they mostly use general statutes which only tangentially happen to involve a piece of physical mail in this specific case.

So you might get charged with stealing, if you stole someones mail. Or identity theft if you do that, with someone elses mail. Or maybe some weird insider trading law, if thats what you do based on some stolen mail.

In other words the trial will be about them doing some naughtyness, and the stolen mail will be a piece of evidence. But there will be no charge of "opening the mail"

That being said, just as anyone can be civil sued for anything at any time by any one, the same applies to criminal court, although that doesn't mean it won't be thrown out with laughter by the judge, or involved as the start or end of a plea bargain, or tossed out on appeal by a sane judge.