When Wayne Rogers, a New Jersey teacher, sat down in his school's computer lab to check his e-mail, he bumped the mouse of the computer next to him. The screen on the adjacent computer came on, and Rogers saw that one of his colleagues, Linda Marcus, had left herself logged into her Yahoo e-mail account. He saw an e-mail thread with the subject "Wayne Update." Curious, he clicked the e-mail and found it was a private discussion with another teacher of an argument between Rogers and Marcus. One of the e-mails read:

I guess [Rogers] chooses not to listen. I will not respond to him. He is sooooo fake. And sooooo with the Dark Side. I will never tell him "The Truth", not because he can't handle it but because he's too dumb to understand it. See you later.

Rogers printed out this e-mail thread, as well as a second thread that also discussed Rogers. Marcus was the president of the local teacher's association, so he brought copies of the e-mail to the next meeting of the association and confronted Marcus about their contents. Outraged, Marcus and other teachers involved in the e-mail threads filed a complaint with the school and eventually filed a lawsuit against Rogers in New Jersey courts.

According to New Jersey law, a person is guilty if he "knowingly accesses without authorization a facility through which an electronic communication service is provided or exceeds an authorization to access that facility." The judge ruled that Marcus, not Rogers, had accessed her e-mail. So Rogers was on safe ground on the "access" question. However, the judge let the jury decide whether Rogers had exceeded the "authorization" Marcus had accidentally granted to him. The jury ruled that he had not. As an appellate opinion puts it:

The judge in this case submitted questions to the jurors that were carefully crafted to ascertain whether Wayne knew he lacked authorization or knew he exceeded his authorization. Their answers demonstrate that they found he did not know. All seven of the deliberating jurors found that he "knowingly accessed" the facility providing the service and that he obtained an electronic communication in electronic storage, but six of the seven found that he had not "exceeded an authorization to access that facility," and seven found that Wayne had "tacit authorization" to do so.

Marcus appealed the decision, but last week a three-judge panel of the Superior Court of New Jersey refused to overrule the jury's decision or find fault with other aspects of how the trial was conducted.

So if someone forgets to log out of her e-mail account, is it illegal to snoop? The frustrating answer, at least in New Jersey, seems to be "it depends on what the jury thinks." Since jurors aren't required to give written opinions, it's hard to know exactly what they were thinking. But at least in this case, the jury concluded that Rogers hadn't broken the law.

Either way, it's a good idea to stay on the safe side. Be sure to log out of your e-mail account if you're using a public computer. And if you discover someone else has left herself logged into an e-mail account, don't snoop.