Zulueta v CA

Facts:

Petitioner Cecilia Zulueta is the wife of private respondent Dr. Alfredo Martin. Sometime March 26, 1962, Cecilia 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 belonging to private respondent, [i.e. greeting cards, cancelled checks, diaries, passport, and photographs], Dr. Martin and his alleged paramours. 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 the injunction declaring the privacy of communication/correspondence to be inviolably apply even to the spouse of aggrieved party.

Held:

Yes. 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 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 infidelity. 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.