A Georgia psychologist is facing the prospect of paying substantial monetary damages for doing what the law in many states requires him to do.

During a fitness-for-duty evaluation with clinical psychologist Anthony Stone, Gwinnett County police officer Gordon Garner III told Stone that he had thoughts about killing his captain, himself, and at least eight other high-ranking police and public officials. Alarmed about the threat he believed Garner posed, Stone informed the police officer’s superiors about the violent imagery revealed in the session.

Garner, who was suspended following the psychologist’s report and then demoted to dog-pound duty before eventually being fired, filed a lawsuit against Stone accusing him of professional negligence and defamation of character. The negligence charge stemmed from Garner’s contention that Stone violated his legal duty to maintain the confidentiality of their session.

The psychologist argued, however, that his obligation to report threats against identified third parties took precedence over the confidentiality requirement.

The only breach of the confidentiality guarantee specifically permitted under Georgia law is in instances in which a psychiatrist or mental health professional learns that a child has been abused, in which case reporting this knowledge is mandatory. The Code of Conduct of the Georgia State Board of Examiners of Psychologists does, however, allow a psychologist to reveal the content of a confidential therapy session if such a breach is required to protect the patient or a third party from harm.

Stone’s attorney, Dennis J. Webb, based his client’s defense on the often-cited precedent set in the 1976 California case Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California, in which that state’s supreme court said that therapists have a duty to "exercise . . .reasonable care to protect" third parties who are potential targets of harm by one of the therapist’s patients. That court also ruled that in cases in which such threats have been made by a patient, there is "no sufficient societal interest that would protect and justify concealment" of the threat, thus giving the duty to warn precedence over the confidentiality privilege.

That ruling proved to have great appeal well beyond California’s borders, and laws based on Tarasoff have since been enacted in about 20 states throughout the U.S. Georgia, however, is not one of those states, and it is partly on that fact that the police officer’s attorney built his case against the psychologist.

Garner’s attorney, Neal H. Howard, argued that the psychologist had no legal basis to breach psychotherapist-patient privilege primarily because it should have been clear that Garner’s homicidal thoughts were just fantasies that he had no intention of acting out. In an affidavit filed for the court, Stone acknowledged that he "did not believe the threats to be imminent in nature but considered them to be very serious."

A Georgia Psychological Association lawyer that Stone consulted advised him that he had a duty to warn the people about whom Garner said he had homicidal fantasies. Stone did so in September 1995, two weeks after his session with the police officer and just after he learned that Garner had fired James Gonzalez, a psychologist with whom Garner had been in therapy. It was Gonzalez who referred the officer to Stone for the fitness-for-duty examination.

The jury was apparently swayed by Stone’s two-week delay in alerting police officials to Garner’s violent thoughts and to the absence of a specific legal obligation in Georgia to warn third parties about threats made against them. They awarded Garner $151,470 in compensatory damages, awarded his wife $25,000 for loss of consortium, and ordered Stone to pay $103,779 for Garner’s legal fees.

Stone has not decided whether to pursue an appeal of the verdict.