''Jaffee v. Redmond'', 518 U.S. 1 (1996), was a
United States Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...
case in which the Court created a
psychotherapist-patient privilege in the
Federal Rules of Evidence
First adopted in 1975, the Federal Rules of Evidence codify the evidence law that applies in United States federal courts. In addition, many states in the United States have either adopted the Federal Rules of Evidence, with or without local v ...
.
Background
Mary Lu Redmond was a
police officer
A police officer (also called a policeman and, less commonly, a policewoman) is a warranted law employee of a police force. In most countries, "police officer" is a generic term not specifying a particular rank. In some, the use of the ...
for the Village of
Hoffman Estates, Illinois
Hoffman Estates is a village in Illinois, United States. The village is located primarily in Cook County, with a small section in Kane County. It is a suburb of Chicago. Per the 2020 census, the population was 52,530.
The village now serves a ...
. On June 27, 1991, she was the first to respond to a fight-in-progress call. She arrived to find Ricky Allen chasing another man and brandishing a
butcher knife. Redmond repeatedly ordered Allen to drop the knife, but Allen ignored her. At one point in the chase, it appeared to Redmond that Allen was about to stab the man he was chasing, and so she shot Allen. Allen died at the scene.
Acting as the representative of Allen's estate, Jaffee filed suit under
42 U.S.C. § 1983
The Enforcement Act of 1871 (), also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, Third Enforcement Act, Third Ku Klux Klan Act, Civil Rights Act of 1871, or Force Act of 1871, is an Act of the United States Congress which empowered the President to suspend t ...
, claiming that Redmond had used
excessive force
Excessive Force is a musical side project started in 1991 by Sascha Konietzko of KMFDM and Buzz McCoy of My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult.
History
In 1991, Excessive Force released the single "Conquer Your House", followed by the album ''Co ...
during the altercation. Witnesses testified that Allen was not armed during the altercation. During discovery, Jaffee discovered that Redmond had sought counseling from a
licensed clinical social worker. Jaffee sought the social worker's notes for the purpose of cross-examining Redmond at the trial. Redmond opposed the request, claiming that the notes were protected by the psychotherapist-patient privilege. The trial judge rejected this argument, and the jury later awarded Allen's
estate $545,000 in damages.
Redmond appealed to the
Seventh Circuit
The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (in case citations, 7th Cir.) is the U.S. federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the courts in the following districts:
* Central District of Illinois
* Northern District of Ill ...
, which vacated the decision of the trial court and remanded. In its opinion, the privilege of which Redmond sought to avail herself did exist in federal law, and the trial court should have applied it. Jaffee asked the Supreme Court to review the Seventh Circuit's decision, and it agreed to do so.
Majority opinion
When the
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washing ...
enacted the
Federal Rules of Evidence
First adopted in 1975, the Federal Rules of Evidence codify the evidence law that applies in United States federal courts. In addition, many states in the United States have either adopted the Federal Rules of Evidence, with or without local v ...
in 1975, it expressly left the development of evidentiary privileges to the courts. The "privilege of a witness... shall be governed by the principles of the common law as they may be interpreted... in the light of reason and experience." Under these common-law principles, the law favors compelling witnesses to give whatever evidence they can, unless there is some other "public good transcending the normally predominant principle of utilizing all rational means for ascertaining
truth
Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as belie ...
."
The psychotherapist-patient privilege, like the
attorney–client and
spousal privilege
In the common law, spousal privilege (also called marital privilege or husband-wife privilege) is a term used in the law of evidence to describe two separate privileges that apply to spouses: the spousal communications privilege and the spousal ...
s, flows from society's desire to facilitate certain relationships of confidence and trust. "Effective
psychotherapy... depends upon an atmosphere of confidence and trust in which the patient is willing to make a frank and complete disclosure of facts, emotions, memories, and fears. Because of the sensitive nature of the problems for which individuals consult psychotherapists, disclosure of confidential communication made during counseling sessions may cause embarrassment or disgrace. For this reason, the mere possibility of disclosure may impede disclosure of the confidential relationship necessary for successful treatment." These are the important societal interests the psychotherapist-patient privilege works to protect.
By contrast, if there existed no privilege for communications between psychotherapists and their patients, people would decide not to seek treatment for mental illness, particularly illnesses and traumas that are likely to result in litigation. If there were no privilege, evidence such as that sought from Redmond by Allen's estate would not likely arise in the first place, and would remain out of court just as if it were privileged.
Two other considerations favored recognizing a federal psychotherapist-patient privilege. First, all 50 states recognized some form of the psychotherapist-patient privilege; thus, the "reason and experience" of those states counseled in favor of recognizing the privilege in federal courts. Indeed, as long as federal courts declined to recognize the privilege, those courts undermined the promise made by the states that afforded the privilege to their citizens. The secrets they shared with their psychologists could still be revealed to the world in federal courts housed across the street from the courts of their own states.
Second, the proposed draft of the Federal Rules of Evidence included nine specific privileges, one of which was a psychotherapist-patient privilege. In the past, the Court had rejected an attempt to create a state legislative privilege within the Federal Rules of Evidence because that privilege was not included in the draft version of the Rules. When it rejected the draft including specific privileges, Congress did not specifically intend to reject the individual privileges. It simply intended to leave the contours of the privileges to the Courts. For all these reasons, the Court held that a psychotherapist-patient privilege existed within the Federal Rules of Evidence.
The Court also had no trouble applying it to therapy provided by a licensed clinical social worker. Social workers provide a significant amount of mental health treatment. Their clients often are of modest means and cannot afford the assistance of psychiatrists and psychologists. The vast majority of states explicitly extend a testimonial privilege to social workers. Thus, the Court saw no reason to delimit the privilege so as to exclude social workers from the privilege.
Dissenting opinion
Justice Scalia
Antonin Gregory Scalia (; March 11, 1936 – February 13, 2016) was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectua ...
disputed every major logical premise on which the majority's decision rested. The heart of his dissent, however, stemmed from two basic propositions. First, that the relative social importance of psychotherapy was not established.
Effective psychotherapy undoubtedly is beneficial to individuals with mental problems, and surely serves some larger social interest in maintaining a mentally stable society. But merely mentioning these values does not answer the critical question: Are they of such importance, and is the contribution of psychotherapy to them so distinctive, and is the application of normal evidentiary rules so destructive to psychotherapy, as to justify making our federal courts occasional instruments of injustice y excluding truthful evidence from court
Second, the lack of sufficient basis to distinguish psychotherapists from others in society in whom people place valuable confidences. "For most of history, men and women have worked out their difficulties by talking to... parents, siblings, best friends, and bartenders—none of whom was awarded a privilege against testifying in court." As a result, he could not see how extending an evidentiary privilege to psychotherapists would facilitate mental health treatment.
From Scalia's vantage point, two flaws in the majority's argument were most troubling. Although all states had a psychotherapist privilege as part of their law, those states had enacted the law through legislation. The majority, by contrast, was creating one judicially after Congress had expressly declined to do so. The majority's justification—that the federal privilege was necessary to avoid undermining the laws of the states—seemed to Scalia to be an inverse form of preemption.
Also, the states were not uniform in their treatment of the question presented in the case—whether the testimony of a licensed social worker should be privileged from disclosure in court. Social workers serve a variety of roles and have a variety of backgrounds and training. "Does a social worker bring to bear at least a significantly heightened degree of skill — more than a minister or rabbi, for example? I have no idea, and neither does the Court."
See also
*
List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 518
This is a list of all the United States Supreme Court cases from volume 518 of the ''United States Reports
The ''United States Reports'' () are the official record ( law reports) of the Supreme Court of the United States. They include rulings, ...
*
List of United States Supreme Court cases
This page serves as an index of lists of United States Supreme Court cases. The United States Supreme Court is the highest federal court of the United States.
By Chief Justice
Court historians and other legal scholars consider each Chief J ...
*
Lists of United States Supreme Court cases by volume
The following is a complete list of cases decided by the United States Supreme Court organized by volume of the ''United States Reports'' in which they appear. This is a list of volumes of ''U.S. Reports'', and the links point to the contents of e ...
External links
* {{caselaw source
, case = ''Jaffee v. Redmond'', {{Ussc, 518, 1, 1996, el=no
, cornell =https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/95-266.ZO.html
, findlaw = https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/518/1.html
, justia =https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/518/1/
, loc =http://cdn.loc.gov/service/ll/usrep/usrep518/usrep518001/usrep518001.pdf
, oyez =https://www.oyez.org/cases/1995/95-266
www.jaffee-redmond.org "The Psychotherapist-Patient Privilege After ''Jaffee v. Redmond'': Where Do We Go from Here?" 76 Wash. U. L.Q. 1341 (1998)
United States Supreme Court cases
1996 in United States case law
Federal Rules of Evidence case law
United States evidentiary privilege case law
United States Supreme Court cases of the Rehnquist Court