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Michigan man cleared of snooping on wife’s email

By L.L. Brasier, Detroit Free Press –

DETROIT — Days before trial, prosecutors dropped felony charges against a Rochester Hills, Mich., man accused of snooping in his wife’s email after they learned that the wife had been snooping on his phone, reading his text messages.

Leon Walker was set to go on trial Monday charged with computer hacking. He was charged in 2010 under the state’s computer hacking law after prosecutors learned he had been reading his wife, Clara Walker’s, email to determine if she was having an affair.

But prosecutors learned late this week that Clara had been doing her own snooping when her attorney in her divorce and custody battle turned over a CD of emails by Clara admitting she had been reading text messages on his phone while the two were married in 2009.

“When we learned this, we immediately moved to drop the charges,” said chief assistant prosecutor Paul Walton. The charge was dismissed this morning. “She is a witness in this case, and it becomes a Fifth Amendment issue.”

Prosecutors, however, plan to proceed with a second charge against Leon Walker, accusing Walker, a computer technician for the county, of attempting to access a confidential law enforcement database, a violation of state law. Walker says that in preparing to defend himself against the email case, he merely asked a county employee how to access the database to see if anyone else in the county had ever been charged with snooping in a spouse’s email, and learned there was none.

Walker will go on trial Monday on that case, also a five-year felony.

His attorney Leon Weiss called the continued prosecution “outrageous.”

“Look, they had no choice on the email case because their key witness was doing exactly what they accused my client of,” Weiss said Friday. “This second charge is even flimsier than the first. I told them you have even less of a chance to prove this. It’s never too late to show integrity and say you made a charging mistake.”

The case garnered worldwide attention when Walker was first charged and prompted a wide ranging debate over whether spouses — and even parents — can peek at family members’ private computer accounts.

Leon Walker was Clara’s third husband. In 2009, suspicious that she was having an affair, he began reading her email on a computer in their Rochester Hills home, and learned that she was having an affair with her second husband, a man who had been arrested previously for beating her in front of a child she had with her first husband. Walker notified the first husband, concerned about the child.

“When I read the email I thought this is disturbing,” he said. “I went to the first husband, and I said you have to act. The evidence showed that she was exposing this child to this man again.”

Clara Walker then went to the police about the snooping.

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