What is the name of your state (only U.S. law)? Florida
Florida has a wire tapping law. If I told my wife and 3 sons that over the next few weeks we will be recording what is sad in the house, and they all agree in the first day of recording by saying their names and ages. Can the information on the recording be used in court?
Thanks,
Johnnie
Give us a few more details. How old are the kids? Does your wife live in the house with you? If your wife does not live in the house with you, in whose house will the recording be done? And importantly, what is the purpose of recording these conversations?
Understand that there are actually two issues here. First is the issue of whether it is legal to record the conversations in the first place. Florida law generally prohibits recording conversations unless all parties to the conversation consent to it. The consent needs to be very clear about exactly what conversations they agree for you to record if you want to want to avoid problems with violating the Florida statute. If the kids are minors, there will be the issue of how consent to record the minors must be done. If you violate the law, you can face criminal prosecution and any recordings you make in violation of the law are not admissible in court.
The second issue is whether the recordings are admissible even if the recordings were legally obtained. In a lot of instances those recordings will amount to hearsay under the rules of evidence, and the general rule is that hearsay is not admissible.
Before you do this, I would strongly recommend that you consult a family law attorney in Florida if you plan to use these recordings in a custody/visitation matter to find out how to do them legally, whether they’d be admissible, and how the judge would likely react to it. Without more details I couldn’t tell you exactly how to proceed or even if it would be worthwhile to try it.
