Reporting Threats

In Canada anyone who knows of a physical threat to an individual or group may report that threat regardless of any otherwise existing professional obligation of confidentiality. That said, the permission to report is not an obligation so to do.


After Anthrax Scientist's Threats, Counselor Faced a Hard Choice
By Anne HullWashington Post Staff WriterSunday, August 10, 2008; A01

On the morning of July 10, Jean C. Duley decided she had a phone call to make. She had agonized all night. Her counseling client, Bruce E. Ivins, had announced in a group therapy session the evening before that he was a suspect in the 2001 anthrax investigation and had a plan to kill his co-workers.

From her desk at Comprehensive Counseling Associates in Frederick, Duley called the Frederick Police Department to report Ivins's threats. The scientist was taken into custody that afternoon and placed in a psychiatric hospital. A day later, the FBI showed up at Duley's office for the first time.

"Everyone thinks I was complicit with the FBI," Duley said in an interview Friday. "The FBI didn't tell me anything."
After Ivins was released from the hospital two weeks later, Duley said, she was so frightened that she asked the FBI for protection. She said an agent basically told her that she was on her own.

"The agent said, 'We are going to be watching him, we can't be watching you,' " according to Duley. With no other alternative, she filed a petition for a restraining order on July 24, providing one of the first public documents that cited worries about Ivins's potential for violence. The scientist died July 29 in what was ruled a suicide.

Duley, 45, appeared exhausted and tearful Friday as she sat in the Towson, Md., office of her attorney, Kathleen Cahill, drinking 7-Eleven coffee, clutching tissue and telling her story for the first time. She would not discuss any aspect of her professional relationship with Ivins, citing patient confidentiality. Documents released by the FBI last week, in support of its case against Ivins in the deadly anthrax mailings of 2001, provide a timeline of his movements and the specific threats he made in Duley's therapy session.

Duley would discuss only the wrenching decision to override patient confidentiality and report Ivins to law enforcement, a move that brought her into a sprawling FBI investigation cloaked in secrecy and surveillance.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/09/AR2008080902108_pf.html