LoreGuard:
One case I seem to recall was in Washington state, if my memory serves me correctly. A judge ruled to make inadmissible evidence that was acquired when an individual whom was past the age of majority was speaking on the phone to a minor child in the parents home, and admitted to a crime the police suspected them of. I believe the judge threatened to throw the books at the _parents_ if they dared do it again.
You may be remembering the decision by the Supreme Court of Washington in
State v. Christensen, 153 Wash. 2d 186 (2005). Washington has one of the strictest statutes governing the interception and/or recording of "transmitted" communications (telephone conversations, email communications, and the like). It is a two-party (actually, "all-party") consent statute, requiring the consent -- either explicit or implicit -- of all participants in the communciation, and expressly states that without such consent information from the "outsider" who violated the statute is inadmissible in any proceeding. In
Christensen, the Washington Supreme Court noted that the statute had no exception for parents who wanted to monitor their minor children's telephone communications. (By the way, in that case at the time of the communications, the criminal defendant and his girlfriend, whose mother listened in through the phone base while her daughter was in another room with the handset, were both minors; by the time of the criminal prosecution, he had turned 18.) The court also held that under the facts of the case, an exception to the state's privacy laws regarding a parent's ability to "invade" a minor's privacy for protection of the minor simply didn't apply.
It's an outlier decision for a lot of reasons (as noted above, Washington's privacy statute in this area is very strict), but it does high-light your main point: a parent's right to monitor/intercept/record a minor child's communications/activities may differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
quote:
I must admit I find it interesting that the same legal system that will sometimes find parents responsible for the minor child's actions (since the child isn't normally considered responsible, and they must blame someone) will sometimes say that the parent has no rights into the privacy of said child.
Part of the issue is that the privacy of said child is not the only privacy at issue -- it could also be the privacy of a third-party for whom the parent has no responsibility, and no inherent "right" or "expectation" to monitor/supervise.
And perhaps a poor analogy, but an employer can be liable for an employee's actions - that doesn't necessarily mean that the employer has carte blanche to invade the privacy of the employees. Though in most U.S. jurisdictions, at least, all that means is that the employer has to notify the employee that, as a condition of employment, the employee's activities may be monitor (computer usage, telephone calls recorded, surveillance cameras in hallways/rooms).