## Facts

- Roy Lee Hayes, a U.S. Postal Service employee, was hospitalized in 1998 for major depression with severe psychotic features.
- During psychotherapy at a Veterans Administration hospital, Hayes told treating clinicians he wanted to kill his supervisor, postmaster Veda Odle.
- Hayes was discharged and later readmitted; he continued to express homicidal thoughts during treatment, though clinicians believed he understood consequences and could control himself.
- During outpatient therapy, a therapist concluded Hayes’s control appeared to be diminishing and warned Odle of the threats.
- Odle reported the warning to a Postal Inspector; the government obtained Hayes’s therapy records and pursued charges.
- A federal grand jury indicted Hayes under 18 U.S.C. § 115 for threatening to murder a federal official, relying essentially on therapy statements and related records rather than any overt steps to carry out the threats.

## Issues

1. Whether the federal psychotherapist–patient privilege under Federal Rule of Evidence 501 includes a “dangerous patient” exception allowing compelled disclosure of threats in a criminal prosecution.
2. Whether a therapist’s protective disclosure to an intended victim (a duty-to-warn disclosure) eliminates the privilege for later compelled testimony and records in a criminal case.

## Decision

- The Sixth Circuit affirmed the district court’s suppression of psychotherapists’ testimony and records and affirmed dismissal of the indictment.
- The court held the federal psychotherapist–patient privilege contains no “dangerous patient” exception.
- The court held that a duty-to-warn disclosure does not, by itself, extinguish the privilege for later compelled disclosure in court.
- Because the prosecution depended on privileged therapy communications, exclusion of that evidence left no basis to proceed.

## Legal Principles

- Under Federal Rule of Evidence 501, confidential communications between a patient and a licensed psychotherapist made for diagnosis or treatment are privileged from compelled disclosure.
- Courts may not create broad, case-specific exceptions to the federal psychotherapist–patient privilege based on a cost-benefit assessment of public safety interests, absent recognition of such an exception in governing privilege doctrine.
- A therapist’s protective warning to a third party may coexist with the evidentiary privilege; disclosure for safety purposes does not automatically render the underlying communications admissible in later proceedings.
- Waiver of the psychotherapist–patient privilege generally requires patient action or consent; disclosure initiated by the therapist to protect a potential victim is not treated as a patient waiver.

## Conclusion

The Sixth Circuit concluded that confidential therapy threats remained privileged despite a therapist’s warning to the intended victim and rejected a “dangerous patient” exception; with the government’s case resting on privileged communications, suppression required dismissal of the indictment.


United States v. Hayes, 227 F.3d 578 (6th Cir. 2000)