Stalking, whatsapp messages provided by the victim can be used as evidence
No court order is needed if the screenshots are provided by the person who participated in the conversation
Whatsapp messages provided by thevictim can be used asevidence in proceedings in stalking offences. The Cassal Court makes it clear, in fact, that a court order is not necessary when it is the person who took part in the conversation who handed over the screenshots to the investigators. Nor is the acquisition of the telematic or figurative support containing the recordings necessary if the offended person has already been deemed credible.
Based on these assumptions, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal of the defendant, convicted of persecutory acts, for the part in which he requested that the DVD made available by his ex with the written and voice conversations from which the evidence of the alleged crime emerged, be considered unusable. In the defence's view, these were in fact 'exchanges' that could not be used because they were protected byconfidentiality in the same way as private correspondence. Moreover, the investigators had come into possession of the material without ascertaining, with an expert opinion, the authorship of the messages. But the Supreme Court explained that the procedure was correct.
The Constitutional Court ruling
The judges of legitimacy recall that theConsulta (judgment 170/2023) has indeed affirmed that e-mail messages, whatsapp messages and text messages, stored in the memory of an electronic device, preserve the legal nature of correspondence even if they have now been received by the recipient.
For this reason they must be acquired with theguarantees provided, for the seizure of correspondence, by the Code of Criminal Procedure (Article 254). A rule that, however, knows someexceptions.
The exceptions to the rule of confidentiality
Among these is the passage of time as a result of which they lose all relevance in relation to the interest in confidentiality, becoming a mere 'historical' document. A confidentiality that is lost even when, as in the case examined, it is the party of the conversation itself that hands them over to the investigators. The circumstance therefore leads to excluding the violation of the confidentiality of correspondence, because the protection guaranteed by Article 15 of the Constitution is limited toexternal interference and does not extend to the availability of the participants.
