Opinion ID: 2062379
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Khiem's Contentions.

Text: Finally, Khiem claims that the hospital and the trial court denied him procedural protections guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. He maintains that the government's law enforcement interest in attempting to restore his competency is insufficient to support the trial judge's order; we have rejected that contention in Part II of this opinion and do not revisit it here. Khiem also contends (1) that the trial judge erred in deferring to the hospital's psychiatric judgment when the principal question before him was a legal one rather than a medical one; (2) that the hospital's procedures were fatally defective because they did not provide Khiem with an adversarial hearing; (3) that it was error for the court to order the administration of psychotropic drugs over Khiem's objection in the absence of expert testimony to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the medication would probably render Khiem competent to stand trial; and (4) that the hospital's decision to medicate was arbitrary and capricious, and should not have been approved by the court. We address each of these contentions in turn.