The privileged quality of communication between husband and wife and between any professional person and the professional person's patient or client, and any other privileged communication, except that between attorney and client, as such communication relates both to the competency of the witness and to the exclusion of confidential communications, shall not apply to any situation involving known or suspected child sexual abuse and shall not constitute grounds for failure to report as required by this part, failure to cooperate with the department in its activities pursuant to this part, or failure to give evidence in any judicial proceeding relating to child sexual abuse.
Tenn. Code Ann. § 37-1-614
Evidentiary privileges inapplicable in child sexual abuse cases
Applied in 3 court decisions — leading case State v. Smith (1996)
Most recently applied in John F. Pinkard, M.D. v. HCA Health Services of Tennessee, Inc. D/B/A Summit Medical Center (June 2017)
Acts 1985, ch. 478, § 15.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Current official text: Tennessee Code (LexisNexis). Digitized from the UniCourt Code Improvement Commission public-domain capture. Reproduced from public-domain Tennessee statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.