Zulueta v. Court of Appeals

On March 26, 1982, Cecilia Zulueta entered the clinic of her husband, Dr. Alfredo Martin, and in the presence of her mother, a driver and his secretary, forcibly opened the drawers and cabinet and took 157 documents. These included private correspondence between Dr. Martin and his alleged paramours, greeting cards, cancelled checks, diaries, his passport and photographs, which she intended to use as evidence in her case for legal separation and for his disqualification from medical practice. Dr. Martin sued to recover the documents and for damages. The RTC of Manila declared him the owner of the papers, ordered their return, awarded nominal and moral damages, and made final a writ of preliminary injunction barring Zulueta and her attorneys from using them as evidence. The Court of Appeals affirmed. Zulueta's sole argument was that in Martin v. Felix, a disbarment case against her lawyer, the Supreme Court had held the documents admissible.

1. 1Whether Martin v. Felix established the admissibility of the documents.
2. 2Whether documents taken by one spouse from the other without consent are admissible in evidence.

The petition was denied. The disbarment case held only that Atty. Felix did not violate the trial court's injunction, because when he used the documents to obtain Dr. Martin's admission of their genuineness, a Supreme Court restraining order had temporarily set that injunction aside. It did not establish the documents' admissibility. The documents are inadmissible. The constitutional declaration that "the privacy of communication and correspondence [shall 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 exceptions are a lawful order of the court or when public safety or order so requires, as prescribed by law, and evidence obtained in violation of the provision is inadmissible "for any purpose in any proceeding." The Court declared: "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." By marrying, a person does not shed his or her right to privacy. The law protects communication between spouses through the marital disqualification and marital privilege rules. But "one thing is freedom of communication; quite another is a compulsion for each one to share what one knows with the other."