Zulueta v. CA
G.R. No. 107383, February 20, 1996

Facts: 

Petitioner Cecilia Zulueta entered the clinic of her husband, Dr. Alfredo Martin. She then forcibly opened the drawers and cabinets therein and took 157 documents consisting of letters between her husband and his alleged paramour, greeting cards, diaries, passport, and photographs. Petitioner used said documents as evidence in a case for legal separation and for disqualification from the practice of medicine which petitioner filed against her husband.

Dr. Martin filed a case for recovery of said documents and papers and for damages against petitioner. After trial, the RTC declared the documents and papers to be properties of Dr. Martin, ordered petitioner to return them to him and enjoined her from using them in evidence. The CA affirmed the decision. 


Issue: 

Whether  or  not  documents  seized  by petitioner are admissible in evidence. 


Held: 

Indeed the documents and papers in question are inadmissible in evidence. The constitutional injunction 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 infidelity) 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 a] court or when public safety or order requires 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 any one of them in breaking the drawers and cabinets of the other and in ransacking them for any telltale evidence of marital infidelity. A person, by contracting marriage, does not shed his/her integrity or 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.