Prague - A four-month suspended prison sentence was the
punishment that a 23-year-old man in the Czech Republic received from
a court for stealing his ex-girlfriend's mobile phone and plunging
through her text messages, reports said Thursday.
A Czech court punished Petr Koldus the young man for 'breaking
secrecy of delivered mail' after he went to his ex's house in July
and made off with her mobile phone. He then read and sent to himself
her text messages.
'The judge evaluated it as behaviour dangerous to society,' Mlada
fronta Dnes daily cited the court's spokesman as saying.
The offender reacted with disbelief. 'I don't understand at all
how the court could have given me a suspended sentence,' he told the
daily.
Upon learning the news, a group of young women in a Prague cafe
joked that prisons would be packed with jealous Czechs convicted for
ferreting through their partners' mobile phone mail boxes.
'I think there is not a single person who has not done it,
especially among women,' said a 31-year-old woman who spoke on
condition of anonymity. 'If it were to be solved by community
service, everything would be clean.'
Groups engaged in the fight against domestic violence welcomed the
verdict.
'It is the first step for people with inclinations to violence to
understand that they do not have a right to do something like this,'
the newspaper cited Zdena Prokopova of Rosa domestic-violence
organization as saying.
She said that checking a partner's text messages and phone calls
can in some cases amount to 'a modern form of mental cruelty.'
Marriage counselor Petr Smolka also agrees with punishing people
for reading their partner's SMS, if for remarkably different reasons.
'These days infidelity is often revealed because a suspicious
partner reads text messages of the other. And it often uselessly
disturbs the marriage,' he was quoted as saying.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
USA
Your Talkback on this Story