Beware of reading your wife's email

One man in Michigan could go to jail for 5 years for logging into his wife's email account and reading her messages. He is being charged under a Michigan statute that is intended to protect against identity theft and hacking into corporate systems for the purposes of intellectual property theft.

I'm having a bit of a hard time wrapping my head around this one. IANAL.

Here's the ostensible story: Husband #3 logs in and reads wife's email and figures out (a) that wife is having an affair with abusive ex-Husband #2 and (b) wife's child with ex-Husband #1 is endangered by this. Husband #3 then forwards wife's emails to ex-Husband #1, apparently out of concern for the child.

A few points strike me as possibly relevant, but then IANAL.

1. Mr. Walker (Husband #3) apparently went out of his way to log in to the email account. Would it have been different if his wife had just left her email logged in and he happened to see the messages? I don't know.
2. He claims it was a shared computer. She claims it was hers, only, though he bought it for her. Does this make a difference? I don't know. I tend to doubt it. The email was in a gmail account which could have been accessed just about anywhere in the world.
3. Independent of having read the emails, does forwarding them to a 3rd party make things worse? I don't know. Intuitively, I would say yes. Forwarding them to law enforcement rather than an interested party might have been more justifiable, though I can understand that many people might not want to get on the law enforcement radar, if they believe they can get things settled privately.
4. Did Mr. Walker have independent reason to fear for the child? Had he, in the past, taken any actions to protect the child? This would establish that he was acting in good faith, rather than trying to take some sort of revenge against the wife.
5. In what way is this different from a husband opening physical mail addressed to his wife? Is it a crime to do this? If so, I doubt that it is ever enforced to the extent of a 5 year jail sentence.

If it turns out that there was independent cause to fear for the child's safety, I think that charges against Mr. Walker will probably be dropped. I don't see any judge or jury coming to the conclusion that anything, much less privacy, trumps a child's well-being. In fact, played right by Walker's defense attorney, even if there was no prior fear of harm to the child, simply raising the possibility may be sufficient to get charges dropped.

What disturbs me most about this case is that while Mr. Walker's motives appear admirable (protecting the child), I would hate this to turn into a green light for just anybody to poke around in their spouse's emails at will. I can see abusive spouses monitoring email to micromanage or to find out about plans to combat the abuse. I can see thoughtless spouses forwarding emails to 3rd parties as a humiliating prank. I'm sure they do this, already, but I don't like to give them the legal air cover to do it with impunity. We no longer question the concept of spousal rape, though we may argue over specific instances. I would submit that pawing through a spouse's emails without an invitation to do so can be a violation in many cases.

For the record, I advise never putting anything in email that would do more than make you look silly. Just a suggestion. YMMV.