A funny thing about distilling
the various thoughts, antics, and events of your day into words which you then
post on Facebook is that such confessions to your Facebook friends might just
land you in jail. By way of example, I
direct you to this little gem of a story about a mother who recounted shaking
her baby to death in posts to her Facebook page @ http://hamptonroads.com/2012/08/mom-busted-facebook-enters-plea-babys-death.
Facebook is not a confessional,
though many of us are guilty of using it as such on occasion. For most of us, these momentary lapses in
good judgment are merely embarrassing in retrospect. However, if they involve legally actionable or criminal conduct,
then you may have a major problem on your hands. Unlike the sins that we may recount to a priest in a
confessional, there is no legally cognizable privilege that can be asserted
with regard to a Facebook post.
Fine, you have marked your
Facebook post as viewable by “friends only”, rather than as “public”. All this does, however, is place your
Facebook post on par with a note or a letter that you have passed to a friend. Unless that friend happens to be your priest
or your lawyer (or, in certain situations, your spouse), it is not a
“privileged” communication that is legally protected from disclosure.
Thus, if your Facebook post
describes your efforts to poison your spouse, how exhausting it was to beat
your child to death, or how you were so drunk last night that you don’t even
remember driving home and your “friend” finds this disturbing, they may feel
compelled to print out a screen shot and deliver it to the local police
department. No privilege has attached
to this communication and your “friend” is completely free to take such
action.
In order for law enforcement to
search your computer or access all of your online missives through Facebook
directly, a search warrant will be required.
However, armed with a copy of the Facebook posts that have been provided
to them courtesy of an online “friend” you have “shared” with, the ensuing
search warrant that will invariably result should not be at all difficult for
law enforcement to obtain.
So, as a general rule of thumb,
prior to “sharing” information with anyone who is not your priest or your
lawyer via any mode of communication, pause for a moment and consider
whether it is something that you want to be discussing as part of a court case
against you. If not, then erase, erase,
erase, hit “cancel”, “log out”, and step away from your computer or mobile
device!
While that may all sound
tongue-in-cheek, as well as obvious, the reality is that almost everything that
we say or do may be used against us unless it falls within one of a
handful of narrow, limited exceptions that the law recognizes. The two most common and most widely
misunderstood types of exceptions are (i) privileged communications and (ii)
the right against self-incrimination.
In order for a communication to
be privileged and, thus, protected from disclosure, it must first be a
communication. A communication can be
oral or in writing, which includes a tweet, a text, an email, a Facebook post,
a notation on a calendar, or even a diary entry. In some instances, a communication may even be non-verbal (or
silent communication) if it is purposeful and done with the intent to convey
information, such as rolling your eyes in some exaggerated fashion or making a
hand gesture.
However, as a general rule, actions
are not communications and, therefore, no privilege attaches. So, if you confess to your priest that you
stabbed someone in the parking lot of a bar last night, that is a protected
communication. If, on the other hand,
your priest is standing next to you in the parking lot when you stab someone,
then the action of the stabbing witnessed by your priest is not a communication
and the priest can be compelled to testify as to what he saw.
If it is a communication, then
the question is to whom was the communication made and is there a privilege
that the law attaches to that particular relationship that would protect it
from disclosure. There are only a few
such relationships and, even within the context of those relationships, the
privilege is not absolute.
The privilege primarily applies
to communications between priest-penitent, doctor-patient, attorney-client, and
husband-wife. Again, these privileges
are not absolute and some may only be asserted by the recipient of the
communication (such as in the case of a clergyman under Virginia law).
If you burst out with “I can’t
believe I just stabbed that guy” while your doctor is stitching you up in the
emergency room, that statement is probably not protected. If you disclose to your therapist that you
intend to poison your husband at dinner, your therapist probably has a legal
duty to report this to the police. If
you tell your attorney that your husband never actually beat you, as you have
alleged in your divorce case, and that you only made these claims to ensure
that you got the kids and the house, then you will have seriously impaired your
attorney’s ability to present “your case”, at a minimum.
The privilege between spouses is
more tenuous and complicated than the other types of privileges and it is one
that is far from absolute. Without
chronicling all of the exceptions, the most important one to be aware of in the
context of family law is that there is no privilege to assert in an adversarial
proceeding against the spouse. Once you
are on one side of the “v.” and your spouse is on the other side of the “v.”,
it is a fair bet that any statements you have made to your spouse during the
course of the marriage may not be protected from disclosure on the basis of
privilege. There may be other
exclusionary rules that could be applied, but “privileged communication” is not
apt to be one of them.
There is no privilege between
parent-child, siblings, extended family members, or best friends, at least not
in the Commonwealth of Virginia where I practice law. So, if you had a marital indiscretion and you do not want your
sister or your best-friend to be summoned to testify against you in a
subsequent divorce case, then do not confide this information to them in the
first place.
It is also worth noting that
there is no privilege in communications with one’s self, such as a diary. So, if you fantasize about poisoning your
spouse or you have committed a marital indiscretion, it is probably best not to
memorialize these tidbits of information in your journal. If journaling is a necessary exercise for
you, then I would suggest burning it as soon as you are done.
With regard to disposal of
diaries, calendars, journals, emails, photos, videos, records, and other
“evidence”, a duty to preserve all such evidence attaches once litigation is
reasonably anticipated. Failure to do
so can result in some fairly hefty sanctions, both monetary and non-monetary,
including barring you from presenting evidence at trial. Once you walk into the attorney’s office to
discuss your impending separation/divorce, it is arguably a little too late in
the process for your attorney to instruct you to burn all of your diaries in
the backyard.
To dispel another common
misconception, the protections set forth in the U.S. Constitution apply to the
actions of the government with respect to the individual, not to actions
between individuals. Over the course of
time, some of these constitutional protections have been extended in limited
ways into other areas through legislation.
So, for example, an employee may have some limited free speech rights,
rights to privacy, and rights against search and seizure with respect to their
employer. However, these rights and
protections do not derive directly from the Constitution, unless the employer
is “acting as an agent of the government.”
With specific regard to the right
against self-incrimination (i.e., “taking the Fifth”), this right only protects
the individual from being forced to give testimony that may reasonably result in
criminal prosecution/criminal liability.
If the conduct being inquired into is merely embarrassing, not criminal,
then there is no such immunity.
In the context of a civil
proceeding, such as a divorce case, this privilege may be invoked in response
to a question at deposition or trial such as “Isn’t it true that you beat your
wife/molested your child/had sex with that other woman/filed a fraudulent tax
return last year?” The privilege does
not apply to past statements, posts on Facebook, confessions to a friend, or
matters that could not reasonably lead to criminal prosecution or criminal
liability. There may be other
evidentiary rules that could be asserted to prevent disclosure, but “taking the
Fifth” is not one of them.*
Depending on the laws of your
particular state, it may be perfectly legal for your spouse to tape record
conversations that you are having with them, to video tape almost anything with
or without your knowledge (provided there is no audio), to access your emails
(unless you have properly protected your passwords), and to access and copy
your computer files if stored on a common or “household” computer. If your passwords are plastered across your
computer on little pink Post-It notes, remove them now.
Messages left on a voice mail or
answering machine are fair game, as are text messages and emails that you send
to your estranged spouse. Posting to
Facebook is the equivalent of walking into your favorite neighborhood
restaurant, standing on top of the bar, and shouting it out to a hundred
witnesses who may be forced to testify against you later. If there are photos to accompany your
Facebook confessions, please reconsider before clicking the “upload photo now”
button, and keep your videos off of You Tube!
* As a technical aside, the Fifth
Amendment privilege applies to actions by the federal government. It is the Fourteenth Amendment that extends
this privilege to state court actions.
So, unless there is also a federal law against adultery (which, to my knowledge,
there is not), then the correct privilege to assert is the Fourteenth
Amendment. As a matter of practice,
however, I usually instruct clients to assert both.
DISCLAIMER:
This site is not intended to provide legal advice nor should any content or correspondence provided herein be construed as forming an attorney-client relationship. All content is intended as general information and/or for entertainment purposes. The attorney responsible for the content of this site is only licensed to practice law in Virginia and the District of Columbia and no content provided on this site is intended as nor should be construed as the practice of law in any jurisdiction in which said attorney is not authorized by law to practice. Should you require legal advice or representation, please contact an attorney authorized to practice law in your jurisdiction.
This site is not intended to provide legal advice nor should any content or correspondence provided herein be construed as forming an attorney-client relationship. All content is intended as general information and/or for entertainment purposes. The attorney responsible for the content of this site is only licensed to practice law in Virginia and the District of Columbia and no content provided on this site is intended as nor should be construed as the practice of law in any jurisdiction in which said attorney is not authorized by law to practice. Should you require legal advice or representation, please contact an attorney authorized to practice law in your jurisdiction.
© 2012 by Jennifer E. Mandell. All rights reserved.
