Zulueta vs. Court of Appeals, 253 SCRA 699 (1996)

Zulueta vs. Court of Appeals, 253 SCRA 699 (1996)

The privacy of communication and correspondence shall be inviolable, except upon lawful order of the court, or when public safety or order requires otherwise as prescrbied by law. Any evidence obtained in violation of this or the preceeding section, shall inadmissible for any purpose in any proceeding.

FACTS:
           Petitioner Cecilia Zulueta is the wife of private respondent Alfredo Martin. On March 26, 1962, petitioner entered the clinic of her husband, a doctor of medicine, and in the presence of her mother, a driver and private respondent's secretary, forcibly opened the drawers and cabinet of her husband's clinic and took 157 documents consisting of private respondents between Dr. Martin and his alleged paramours, greeting cards, cancelled check, diaries, Dr. Martin's passport, and photographs. The documents and papers were seized for use in evidence in a case for legal separation and for disqualification from the practice of medicine which petitioner had filed against her husband.

ISSUE: Whether or not the papers and other materials obtained from forcible entrusion and from unlawful means are admissible as evidence in court regarding marital separation and disqualification from medical practice.

HELD:
       Indeed the documents and papers in question are inadmissible in evidence. The constitutional injuction declaring "the privacy of communication and correspondence to be inviolable" is no less applicable simply because it is the wife (who thinks herself aggrieved by her husband's infedility) who is the party against whom the constitutional provision is to be enforced. The only exception to the prohibition in the constitution is if there is a "lawful order from the court or which public safety or order require otherwise, as prescribed by law." Any violation of this provision renders the evidence obtained inadmissible "for any purpose in any proceeding."

      The intimacies between husband and wife  do not justify anyone of them in breaking the drawers and cabinets of the other and in ransacking them for any telltale evidence of marital infedility. A person, by contracting marriage, does not shed her/his integrity or her/his right to privacy as an individual and the constitutional protection is ever available to him or to her.

      The law insures absolute freedom of communication between the spouses by making it privileged. Neither husband nor wife may testify for or against the other without the consent of the affected spouse while the marriage subsists. Neither may be examined without the consent of the other as to any communication received in confidence by one from the other during the marriage, save for specified exceptions. But one thing is freedom of communication; quite another is a compulsion for each one to share what one knows with the other. And this has nothing to do with the duty of fidelity that each owes to the other.