This article describes some of the legal and ethical issues for mental health practitioners of court-ordered report writing, which in New Zealand occurs pursuant to section 38 of the Criminal Procedure (Mentally Impaired Persons) Act 2003 [the CP (MIP) Act]. The context is a real-life case vignette of a situation in which one of the authors, acting as a health assessor authoring a court-ordered report, resisted a production order sought by the police and issued by the District Court. The production order specified that the health assessor's handwritten contemporaneous notes were to be handed over to the police, and for the health assessor to be interviewed by them, ostensibly to aid the police in gathering evidence with respect to charging the defendant with manslaughter. This order was challenged. The authors discuss the ethical responsibilities of health assessors and the need to exercise discretion in determining how much information to divulge in a court-ordered psychiatric report.
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