Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California

Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, 17 Cal. 3d 425, 551 P.2d 334, 131 Cal. Rptr. 14 (Cal. 1976), was a case in which the Supreme Court of California held that mental health professionals have a duty to protect individuals who are being threatened with bodily harm by a patient. The original 1974 decision mandated warning the threatened individual, but a 1976 rehearing of the case by the California Supreme Court called for a "duty to protect" the intended victim. The professional may discharge the duty in several ways, including notifying police, warning the intended victim, and/or taking other reasonable steps to protect the threatened individual. Prosenjit Poddar was a student from Bengal, India, who entered the University of California, Berkeley, as a graduate student in September 1967 and resided at its International House. In the fall of 1968 he met Tatiana Tarasoff at a folk dancing class, and they dated. When Tarasoff told him she was involved with other men, he began to stalk her. He became depressed, neglecting his studies and his health, keeping to himself, speaking disjointedly, and often weeping. He had occasional meetings with Tarasoff and secretly tape-recorded their conversations in an attempt to discover why she did not love him. During the summer of 1969, Tarasoff traveled to South America. Poddar began to improve and entered therapy with Lawrence Moore, a psychologist at the student health service at Cowell Memorial Hospital in 1969. Poddar confided to Moore his intent to kill Tarasoff. Moore wrote to the campus police saying that Poddar was suffering from acute and severe paranoid schizophrenia, and recommending that Poddar be civilly committed as dangerous. Poddar was detained but shortly released, as he appeared rational. Moore's supervisor, Harvey Powelson, then ordered that Poddar not be subject to further detention. Neither Tarasoff nor her parents received any warning. In October, after Tarasoff had returned, Poddar stopped seeing Moore. Poddar then befriended Tarasoff's brother and moved in with him.