The Creedmoor Psychiatric Center was rightly barred from forcibly administering antipsychotic drugs to an involuntarily confined patient, an appellate court has held in finding that the trial court properly applied the missing witness rule when the hospital declined to offer testimony of the treating psychiatrist.
Creedmoor "would have us carve out an exception to the well-established missing witness rule, prohibiting its application generally in every treatment-over-objection proceeding or, specifically, in the instant proceeding," Justice Daniel Angiolillo (See Profile) wrote Wednesday for the Appellate Division, Second Department, in Matter of Adam K., 2011-10758. But the court said the hospital had offered no good reason for it to take such a drastic position.
