Legal newspaper The Recorder today that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that psychiatrists cannot testify against their clients in court. The decision grew out of a lawsuit in Oregon where a man was convicted on two counts of threatening to murder FBI agents based on two pieces of evidence: some things he said to a telephone operator, and his confession that he was having murderous thoughts in a therapy session. After the court?s decision, he was acquitted on the second count.

What this means is that while counselors/therapists/psychiatrists are obligated to report clients who seem homicidal or suicidal, information from their sessions with the client will not be admissable as evidence in court. On the one hand, this seems like a good idea: it will reduce the number of people convicted of thought crimes and (as the judges wrote in the majority opinion) it will allow people to get more therapy rather than making a decidedly non-therapeutic trip to prison. But the problem is that counselors who have genuinely dangerous patients will have to rely on law enforcment to find more evidence before they can take custody of a possibly suicidal or violent person. In some cases, perhaps involving angry Muslims, I could imagine law enforcement being eager to gather this extra evidence (unanswered question: does testimony from a shrink constitute enough evidence to merit a wiretap?). In other cases, though, I could see law enforcement dragging their feet, telling a shrink that just because some guy says he feels like raping his girlfriend that doesn?t mean he needs to be investigated.

So I?m on the fence with this one.