Law-changing moments
If you walk into any law library, you’ll find many bookcases filled with court decisions — neatly-bound, almost identical volumes that lawyers like to pose in front of when making television commercials. Yet those cases are only a tiny tip of a very large iceberg of cases that could have ended up there.
Most cases get resolved before they are filed — minor car collisions, a slip-and-fall case at a grocery store, and so forth. The other party’s insurance carrier will usually offer the injured party a small “nuisance settlement” — enough money to convince the person to go away. And of those cases that do get filed, most are resolved before they get to trial — either settled (for more money) or dismissed by a judge on some legal ground.
And of those cases that get to a trial, few are ever appealed. And of those appealed, many still do not end up in the published volumes because they set no new precedent.
But some cases buck that trend. And one of those — which changed California law in significant ways — started with a tragic incident in October, 1969.
Tatiana Tarasoff, known to her family as Tanya, was a 20 year-old student at U.C. Berkeley that year. While at the university, she met a young man named Prosenjit Poddar, a student from Bengal, India. Poddar became smitten with the young Ms. Tarasoff, and at one point in their relationship she even let him kiss her. But she did not share his feelings, and she told him that she didn’t want a relationship with him.
At one point, when she was out of the country traveling, Poddar went to see a psychologist employed by the university named Dr. Lawrence Moore. During one of his sessions with Dr. Moore, Poddar admitted to having thoughts of killing Tatiana.
Dr. Moore concluded that Poddar was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, and even recommended his detention as a danger to others. The police were called, but then Poddar seemed to improve, and Dr. Moore’s supervisor ordered Poddar’s release.
On October 27, Poddar carried out the threat he had expressed. He turned up at Tatiana’s home. He was initially turned away, but when he returned, only Tatiana was there, and he brandished a knife, chasing her down and stabbing her to death.
Poddar was prosecuted for her killing, while her parents sued the university, including Dr. Moore and the police involved in Poddar’s detention, for failing to warn Tatiana of Poddar’s murderous intentions. The case was initially dismissed by the trial court, which found that the university and its officials had no duty to Tatiana.
So the Tarasoffs appealed, and finally, in 1976, nearly seven years after her death, the case was decided by the California Supreme Court. The court concluded that although psychotherapists have a duty to maintain the confidentiality of their relationship with a patient, and what the patient tells a therapist, there would henceforth be an exception when a patient made a threat against an identifiable person.
Two judge dissented, and one did so in part. The dissenters argued, among other things, that the benefit to society from therapists having such a duty to warn would undermine the general confidentiality that patients enjoy when seeking therapy. And if it became widely known that therapists have to warn the subject of a threat, that might deter those with such impulses from seeking therapy.
The Tarasoffs and the university eventually settled out of court. Poddar was convicted of second degree murder. He also appealed, resulting in another decision by the California Supreme Court (ironically, two years before the Tarasoff decision), reversing his conviction on the ground of improper jury instructions. The prosecution declined to retry him on condition that he return to India. One can sense the attitude of, “Well, at least now he’s someone else’s problem.”
In 1985 the Legislature passed a statute codifying (and narrowing) the Tarasoff decision, stating that a therapist’s duty to a third party only arises when there is a threat against a “reasonably identifiable person,” and that the duty can be discharged by “making reasonable efforts to communicate the threat to the victim or victims and to a law enforcement agency.”
Tarasoff also led to an interesting post-script. In a 1992 dispute over some audiotaped therapy sessions that the prosecution sought in a murder investigation, the Supreme Court confirmed the “dangerous patient” exception to the psychotherapist-patient privilege — this time, oddly, when the subject of the threats was, in part, the therapist himself.
And you might recognize the names of his two patients: Erik and Lyle Menendez.