Man sent to jail for reading wife's emails. What do you think of this?

lol…good

Let me say just this:
Someone who does not have the courage and decency to talk to his wife about it first, and instead decides to “hack into her emails”, does not have the right to complain about his wife seeking satisfaction elsewhere.
I wonder in what other ways he mistreated her.

@ragingloli – I definitely see your point, but don’t you think she is just as gutless for carrying on the affair without discussing her dissatisfaction with him first? Do you think that someone who carried on an affair behind their partner’s back would necessarily tell the truth if confronted? I’m not taking sides, just asking….........

@Harold
Yes, she is just as spineless as him.
And there is more.
She did not confront him about any issues that may have lead her to cheating, and he did not confront her about his suspicions and instead proceeded to violate her privacy in a criminal manner.
It means neither of those two trusted the other, and if you do not trust your partner you should not really be in a relationship in the first place.
Also, cheating on your partner is not a crime, the IT offences apparently are.

@ragingloli – yes, I agree they are as bad as each other.

He didn’t hack. He guessed the password.

So I guess she must’ve got nothing in the settlement and so she is pissed off. I don’t get it. If he hired a PI to investigate than she wouldn’t have grounds to take him to court.
If I was him, I would go about proving I bought the computer. I would think anything done on my computer gives me the right to research, unless it was her own private pc.
I tell my husband all my passwords. But then I have nothing to hide. He was probably suspicious because she wouldn’t share her account information.
I think this is a waste of court time and money. There are much more serious crimes being commited. She should just move on with her lover. Unless of course she lost him once he figured she was available. LOL Does happen. Some guys like hooking up with married women because they figure they don’t have to do anything more than have sex with them.

I think it is a misuse of the law he has been charged under.

As far as I’m concerned if you give your password to somebody it free game. I know all my fiancé passwords and bank info. He also knows mine.
How many spouses open their SO’s mail?

That’s a first, for being threatened with jail for hacking into your wife’s e-mail. It seems to be a regular part of the nasty divorce routine. I suspect many many folks do this, and get off scott free. In fact I know one person who has done it repeatedly, been confronted, and so on, and the judge doesn’t seem to care, but that judge was biased on behalf of the husband.

He finally got himself in trouble with that judge, for violating a ruling, but that took years of nonsense before the judge got fed up. Sheesh.

Look at the situation outside the husband/wife scenario, which is what I suspect the judge in this case was doing. I think it is possible that this judge may be more interested in setting a precedent for computer privacy than with the mundane details of this divorce case. This is probably how the judge viewed things:

Someone hacked into another person’s email. Because they are husband and wife and because one of them thought the other was cheating is not justification and is irrelevant to this judge because he’s looking at the privacy part of the equation, not the emotional nasty divorce part. The law isn’t emotional.

Either you prosecute people for hacking or you don’t. The law has to be applied equally. If the law doesn’t apply to a guy who breaks into his wife’s email account to see if she’s cheating, how can you ask the court to apply it on your behalf to the guy who hacked into your email account and stole your credit card and bank account information? I think this is the point the judge is trying to make. If you want computer privacy laws enforced, you can’t cherry pick them because you feel sorry for this guy and think he was justified since his wife was really cheating on him. What if he hacked her email and found that she wasn’t cheating? Would we feel the same about the situation? If he thought she was cheating, he should have filed for divorce. If he wanted to, he could then have subpoenaed her computer records to prove his allegations of adultery. Instead he took the law into his own hands, which makes him a hacker. He could have gotten his proof through legal means.

I feel sorry for both of them for not catching their problems before it led to this.

@ChocolateReigns I agree. I think this may be a poor case for computer privacy too because people are going to have a hard time not thinking this is just a vindictive woman trying to get revenge. A less emotionally charged case might have been a better choice to make the point. However, the woman is within her rights to pursue it.

The hubby (3rd husband!) printed out evidence of her cheating with her second husband, and gave them to the first husband. It wasn’t necessarily the reading her email as much as printing them out and giving them to others that led to charges.

Felony charges though are over the top. Maybe misdemeanor harassment, but not felony.

@zenvelo It not the reading or the printing, it’s the unlawful hacking into the account itself.

It’s not often that I agree with @ragingloli on everything she says in a thread. One of us must be mellowing.

hacking is illegal anyways…. what has the world become today?

I agree with @marinelife

If both were married and lived together under same roof, i cannot see how this law will ever make it in court. a married couple is just that….. married. you share everything.

@john65pennington Actually, you don’t, because a) married people can still own separate property and b) getting married does not terminate an individual’s right to privacy.

Petty. Very petty.

@diavolobella The opinion piece I read in this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle quoted the DA as saying he printed the emails and then “used them in a contentious way”. It seemed that was what aggravated the situation.

The “hacking” is in question, as he used their common computer, and said she left her password around the house.

It’s all pretty silly.

@zenvelo That makes it different. Using her password without her knowledge is not “hacking” in the sense of breaking in from another remote computer via the Internet or a server, but it’s still an invasion of privacy. Maybe unauthorized use is a better term. If he took those emails and did something with them that made them public, then he’s in a whole other type of trouble. That’s just invasion of privacy.

IDK…what right to privacy is there in a shared household? I mean, yeah, you want your own space, but that’s a desire that may or may not be honored. Can a teen sue his or her parents for snooping through his or her room?

@Dutchess_III Very good point.

I found those nasty thongs of yours, btw. You tried to hide them, but I found them and frew ‘em in the fireplace!!

Dutchess, you crack me up…

It’s a waste of jail space.

@Neizvestnaya X2.
@snowberry Me too! Or….maybe I spend too much time alone!? I have no one else around to crack me up but me…

Thanks for all of your answers- some interesting perspectives.