In an upcoming divorce trial, a Brooklyn woman may introduce e-mails surreptitiously culled from her estranged husband's e-mail account as evidence of his scheme to hide his true income, a Supreme Court judge has ruled.
Justice Jeffrey S. Sunshine said the woman's accessing of her husband's account did not constitute "eavesdropping" under New York's Penal Law and therefore does not render the e-mails inadmissible.
The decision turned on the fact that the wife looked at e-mails stored in her husband's account, rather than intercepting e-mails while they were "in transit" to him.
"It is this court's understanding from the reading of the statute, legislative history and case law that the purpose of Penal Law § 250.00 is to prohibit individuals from intercepting communication going from one person to another, and in this case an email from one person to another," Justice Sunshine wrote in Gurevich v. Gurevich, 42358/07. "In the case at bar the email was not 'in transit,' but stored in the email account."
The parties, software developer Yelena Gurevich and computer programmer Vladimir Gurevich, married in June 1990.
In 2001, Mr. Gurevich was laid off and switched to a less lucrative career as a medical technician.
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Source: law.com
By: Mark Fass
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