Every person who shall wrongfully obtain or attempt to obtain, any knowledge of a telegraphic message, by connivance with the clerk, operator, messenger, or other employee of a telegraph company, and every clerk, operator, messenger, or other employee of such company who shall willfully divulge to any but the person for whom it was intended, any telegraphic message or dispatch intrusted to him or her for transmission or delivery, or the nature or contents thereof, or shall willfully refuse, neglect, or delay duly to transmit or deliver the same, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
RCW 9.73.010
Divulging telegram.
Applied in 8 court decisions — leading case 106 Wash. 2d 54 - State v. Gunwall (1986)
Most recently applied in 221 W. Va. 70 - State v. Mullens (April 2007)
2011 c 336 s 323; 1909 c 249 s 410; Code 1881 s 2342; RRS s 2662.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: Washington State Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain Washington statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.