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HARRISBURG – A 3-2 split of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania recently ruled that a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center psychiatric facility had a duty to warn a teenage student that her life was in danger from one of its residents.
The majority complement of the Court issued the ruling on July 21, in the process dismissing a call from UPMC to dismiss the litigation. Supreme Court Justice Kevin M. Dougherty wrote the Court’s majority opinion, while colleague Justice Max Baer authored a dissent, joined by Chief Justice Thomas G. Saylor.
Supreme Court justices David Wecht and Christine Donohue were not involved in the ruling.
The events of the case date back to 2008, when 19 year-old Lisa Maas was a student at the Pennsylvania Culinary Institute and residing in an apartment complex in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh.
At the same, a psychiatric patient battling drug addiction named Terrance Andrews lived in the same complex, just a few doors down the hallway from Lisa. He told his caregivers at UPMC Presbyterian Shadyside on more than one occasion that he was going to murder one of his neighbors, but declined to name the neighbor in question. The neighbor would be Lisa, whom Andrews stabbed to death with a pair of scissors in May 2008.
Andrews was later convicted of first-degree murder in an Allegheny County court in 2011, and is currently serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole.
Maas’ mother, Laura Maas, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against UPMC, claiming it had a legal duty to warn her daughter and the other neighbors at the apartment complex of the danger posed by Andrews.
The Superior Court of Pennsylvania rejected an attempt from UPMC to dismiss the case, which caused the hospital to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Though the hospital argued the homicidal threats from Andrews weren’t specific enough to warrant warning possible victims in his building, Dougherty disagreed completely with that rationale and cited Emerich v. Phila. Ctr. for Human Dev., Inc.
In that action, it was determined that “under certain limited circumstances,” a mental health professional “owes a duty to warn a third party of harm against that third party.”
Andrews repeatedly told his caregivers he would kill his neighbors, thereby adding a layer of specificity to his threat.
“It is clear that appellants might have surmised, on ‘a moment’s reflection,’ that Andrews was targeting residents of his apartment building specifically, and particularly those on his floor with whom he interacted or had greater opportunity to interact. Indeed, Andrews referred on multiple occasions to ‘next-door neighbors,’ and a ‘neighbor’ who knocked on his door in the ‘middle of the night,” Dougherty said.
“Under the undisputed facts of the current record, it cannot reasonably be said that when Andrews threatened to kill a ‘neighbor,’ he was uttering an ambiguous threat against ‘amorphous group’ of the public at large, residing in the urban South Oakland section of Pittsburgh generally, rather than one of his neighbors residing in Hampshire Hall,” Dougherty said.
He cited the Code of Ethics of Pennsylvania’s State Board of Psychology, which states psychologists should take “reasonable measures to prevent harm when a client has expressed a serious threat or intent to kill or seriously injure an identified or readily identifiable person or group of people.”
“The Superior Court correctly determined that the legal principles set forth in Emerich indicate appellants had a duty to warn ‘readily identifiable’ victims, and the present record supports a finding that Lisa Maas, who was a neighbor who resided on the same floor of Hampshire Hall as Andrews, was just such a ‘readily identifiable’ victim,” Dougherty stated.
However, Baer’s dissent found Andrews’ homicidal threats weren’t specific enough to cause UPMC to warn his neighbors, which Baer said were not a “readily identifiable” group.
“One’s ‘neighbor’ in an urban setting, however, is not readily identifiable, as it may encompass tenants on either side of one’s apartment; tenants residing on the same floor; those living on other floors in the same building; residents inhabiting apartments in a building adjacent to the patient’s residence; and those living on the same block or within the same community, and so on, without a discernable limited criteria,” Baer said.
“To impose a legal obligation on mental health professionals to warn a large, amorphous group of potential targets is unworkable, as mental health professionals will be unable to ascertain who is entitled to a warning. Further complicating the matter is that it is unclear when the mental health professional’s duty shifts from treating the mentally ill patient to protecting the safety of the patient’s ‘neighborhood.”
Supreme Court of Pennsylvania case 7 WAP 2019
Superior Court of Pennsylvania case 185 WDA 2017
Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas case GD-09-018900
From the Pennsylvania Record: Reach Courts Reporter Nicholas Malfitano at nick.malfitano@therecordinc.com