| Venue: | CA SC |
| Facts: | Poddar is violent and crazy and his psychiatrist knows it. He warns the police, who detain him briefly, but then the psychiatrist's boss says to let him go. Wouldn't you know it, he goes and kills exactly the person he was threatening to. |
| Posture: | Dismissed at trial. |
| Issue: | Was there a duty to warn the person who was threatened? |
| Holding: | Quite possibly. This should not have been dismissed. |
| Rule: | A defendant owes a duty of care to those who are foreseeably endangered by his conduct. |
| Reasoning: | Generally, there's no duty to act absent a special relationship. The doctor-patient relationship, however, is special, and might create a duty towards third parties. Where it's a situation where professionals might differ about whether there is danger, the therapist's judgment controls. Here, though, there was no failure to predict that Poddar was a hazard. If the therapist determines (or should have done so) that the patient poses a serious danger, there's a duty to exercise reasonable care to protect the foreseeable victim. The public policy arguments against this are overriden by the immediate danger to life and limb. |
| Dicta: | Dissent: tort principles favor non-disclosure: confidentiality is necessary for effective treatment. This will cause therapists to issue excessive warnings in order to avoid liability, and that will undermine the profession. |