Duty to Warn

You go to a psychiatrist or counselor and pour out your heart... your sadness, your failings, your deepest, darkest secrets... secrets you have never shared with anyone. You trust this professional because they are uniquely trained to help people through troubled times. And you share this this confidential secret with your therapist. YOU'RE THINKING ABOUT KILLING SOMEONE Now what?

The psychiatrist-patient relationship is one of the most tightly protected and sacred in our legal system... until October 27, 1969, when on the front lawn of a nondescript home in a quiet Berkeley suburb, a young woman lay dying, stabbed repeatedly and shot to death by a man who declared that he loved her. The man had shared that intention with his therapist.

His name is Prosenjit Poddar, an Indian-born Berkeley graduate student, full of intelligence and great promise, who months earlier met Tanya Tarasoff at a dance at the International House. From the moment he laid eyes on her, he became obsessed with her and planned to marry her. They went on a few dates but Tanya did not share his monumental romantic feelings. She was just starting school and wanted to explore the myriad possibilities of life in the turbulent, thrilling Berkeley milieu.

Poddar's obsessive, single-minded pursuit of Tanya led him down a terrifying vortex of intent as months passed. He taped their conversations, stalked her, moved in with her brother on a false pretext. And finally one afternoon, he hid near the home she shared with her parents, armed with a 13-inch butcher knife and a gun. When he found her alone, he burst through her front door and mercilessly executed her.

With her last strength, Tanya fled her home to collapse before her horrified neighbors as her killer knelt beside her, tenderly declaring his love and insisting her death was her own fault. Calm and composed now, he laid down the knife beside his victim, re-entered her home, and summoned the police.

This tragic afternoon abruptly ended Tanya Tarasoff's young life, but it triggerred a seminal and revolutionary court case that reaches the core of the American justice system. Poddar had gone to the Counseling Center on Berkeley's campus to seek help with his uncontrollable feelings. In counseling sessions with psychologist Lawrence Moore, he shared his darkest secret... he was planning to kill Tanya.

The legal aftermath of those counseling sessions now guides two foundational concepts: the Duty to Warn, and the Duty to Protect that together take precedence over doctor-patient confidentiality. Tanya's murder now obligates therapists or other professionals, if they have reason to believe a patient intends to harm another, to report it both to law enforcement and to the intended victim. Failure to do so can be a crime. Decades later, the landmark California Supreme Court's 1978 ruling is still fiercely debated. New law is being written every day in Tanya Tarasoff's name.

The limited series Duty to Warn returns us to one of America's most turbulent eras. The late 1960s saw Vietnam War protests and student activism on college campuses, the harbinger of drug use, police brutality, and cries for racial justice. It also saw the awakening of free human sexuality in the Summer of Love, and a woman's right to choose what to do with her body.

This series explores the events and choices that led to Tanya's death. Had she been warned, could she have been saved? October 27, 1969 spawned a legal infrastructure that would work to protect many lives. Poddar's criminal trial shook Tanya's friends and family, as well as the Berkeley and Bay Area communities to their core.

And civil case, Tarasoff v. the Regents of the University of California, still shapes the doctor-patient relationship today. The Duty to Warn that emerged seeks to protect a patient's potential victim while defining the thin line that doctors must tread when deciding whose safety and secrets they must protect, and at what cost.

This story takes you to the heart of the murder and its ongoing outcome.