Court Opinion

ID: 9498147
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:09:18.530149+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:38.840369
License: Public Domain

B. FLETCHER, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the result but I must take exception to one point of analysis in the majority’s opinion. It is not necessary to reach the issue of patient-psychotherapist privilege to decide this case. Overwhelming evidence that Romo violated 18 U.S.C. § 871 by threatening the life of the President was presented at trial, including the testimony of a Secret Service Agent that Romo confessed to sending a threatening letter and a signed transport sheet on which Romo repeated his threat against the President, signed his name, and stamped his thumb print. The therapist’s testimony only repeated the Secret Service Agent’s testimony. If admitting the therapist’s testimony was error, it was harmless error. See United States v. Bauer, 132 F.3d 504, 510 (9th Cir.1997). Nevertheless, the majority opinion reaches the issue of whether the therapist’s testimony should have been excluded as privileged. I respectfully disagree with the majority’s conclusion that Romo’s conversation with his therapist LaPlante was not privileged.
The Supreme Court affirmed a patient-psychotherapist privilege under Rule 501 of the Federal Rules of Evidence in Jaffee v. Redmond, 518 U.S. 1, 15, 116 S.Ct. 1923, 135 L.Ed.2d 337 (1996). The requirements of the privilege are: (1) the communications must be confidential; (2) the therapist must be a licensed psychotherapist; and (3) the communications must occur in the course of diagnosis or treatment. Id. I agree with the majority that the first two factors are not in doubt. LaPlante is a licensed psychotherapist and Romo’s communications to LaPlante were confidential. I disagree with the majority’s conclusion that Romo’s communications did not occur in the course of diagnosis or treatment.
Prior to Romo mailing a threatening letter to the President, LaPlante in his *1053capacity as a licensed professional counsel- or, met with Romo on multiple occasions to provide Romo with mental health treatment. Romo and LaPlante’s most recent meeting, before the meeting, where the letter was discussed, was a confidential counseling session.
Romo went to LaPlante, on the day in question, to discuss the letter because he was troubled by what he had done. La-Plante said that at the session Romo “was concerned that he had done something very dumb. I asked him what that was. He indicated that he wrote a letter to the President.” At the session LaPlante listened to Romo and discussed Romo’s concerns. At the suppression hearing La-Plante said he would not turn over his notes from the session without permission from Romo or a court order.
The meeting between Romo and La-Plante mirrors the characteristics of a counseling session. When a patient contacts his therapist, with whom he has an on-going patient-therapist relationship, to discuss a problem the patient is having and the patient and therapist subsequently meet and discuss the problem the resulting conference is a counseling session. This is exactly the course of events that occurred between Romo and his therapist LaPlante. To conclude otherwise disregards the reality of the psychiatrist-patient relationship and the nature of psychiatric treatment.