"Yes, you bet electronic spying is making it easier to settle divorces," said the State Supreme Court justice who requested anonymity. "West Indians are taking advantage of it and the evidence is often irrefutable."
Marston Gibson, a senior Bajan attorney and matrimonial referee on Long Island, has not settled any cases in New York involving evidence gathered from computers, Ipods, cellphones and automobile tracking devices, but he knows justices who have.
"It's a logical extension of what we had before, tapping the telephone and using private detectives. But the technological sophistication that apparently knows no bounds is opening up additional means of gathering evidence, and spouses, not paid professionals, are doing it," the Bajan told the SUNDAY SUN.
"Whenever you use your cellphone or email, you are leaving an electronic trail behind for your spouse and if you are conducting an extra-marital affair you should expect that sooner or later he or she will eventually find out."
And that's true whether you are in the Bronx, Miami, Boston, Speightstown, Maryland, Bridgetown, London, Toronto.
Lionel Hurst, a former Caribbean Ambassador at the United Nations and the Organisation of American States who is practising law in New York and handles divorces, said:
"Now that divorces are much easier to get in New York, the evidence of infidelity can become crucial when it comes to spousal support or dividing up marital community property."
Take the case of a Bajan woman in The City who suspected her husband was having an affair with a friend of the family in Brooklyn. She perused his cellphone and found five or six calls a day to the woman's number, and when he was confronted, he didn't have a plausible explanation.
When her attorney secured a court order to seize the hard-drive of his laptop, the conversations via email and in documents with the woman were quite shocking, she said.
Then, there was the West Indian husband who installed a tracking device on his wife's computer that allowed him to record all of her emails and send them to him electronically. He was able to print the lovey-dovey messages.
A Caribbean attorney in Queens told the story of a West Indian woman who was convinced her husband was carrying on with another woman. Knowing that his car was fitted with an electronic tracking device designed to enable the police to find stolen vehicles, she called the cops and reported the family car stolen.
True enough, within an hour the cops found it parked outside a large housing complex.
"The electronic gear is turning average husbands and wives into private detectives and many of them are doing a very good job at it," said Hurst. "There are privacy issues involved in many of these cases, such as who can gain access to someone's personal email. But the key thing is the hard electronic evidence."
Lawyers in the United States estimate that about 75 per cent of the cases they handled between spouses involved some kind of communication taken from computers, cellphones and other devices.
"The electronic items we buy may have become a part of us. We can't do without them. But they are also storing information that can be used against us in a court of law, if a judge believes it is relevant and was gathered legally," said Gibson, a Rhodes scholar who taught law at the Univeristy of the West Indies in Barbados.
Divorce lawyers say court orders to seize computer hard-drives are often issued if a spouse has good reason to believe that assets are being hidden from the court.