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If the conditions are such as you’ve outlined (the patients were not in jeapordy, and they did NOT want the drug adminstered), then of course the doctors should have not administered any such substance. That is not how I remember seeing the story presented at the time, however, but if additional info. has come forward as you suggest, then maybe the doctors (or at least that one) should have been indicted.

You should read the entire story. Here's an excerpt (parenthetical expressions and emphases are my own comments):

The summary [of the AG's report] states that [Dr.] Pou told the nurse executive of Lifecare, the acute care facility on the seventh floor of the hospital that housed the nine patients, that "a decision had been made to administer lethal doses of morphine to Lifecare patients."

According to the report, none of the nine was a patient of Pou's and there was no indication she had talked to their doctors before seeing them on the day they died.

The attorney general's report also said that other medical personnel told Pou that one of the patients, Emmett Everett Sr., was conscious and alert. Everett was 61 years old, weighed almost 400 pounds and was confined to a wheelchair.

"Dr. Pou decided (patient name blacked out) could not be evacuated. He could not be taken out by boat because he was not ambulatory and Dr. Pou felt he was too heavy to be evacuated by helicopter," according to the report.

In a written statement, Pou's lawyer denied that the combination of morphine and Versed is a "lethal cocktail." In addition, Rick Simmons said Pou's own expert said it is well-known among scientists that blood levels of morphine are "greatly increased" in patients who have been dead for many days.

Pou does not deny giving the patients drugs. In the days following Hurricane Katrina, floodwaters ran freely through the sweltering, pitch-black hospital, carrying human waste through its corridors, Pou told Newsweek.

Patients were moaning and crying in the halls; some were being fanned with slats of cardboard, others cooled off with dirty water and ice. Treatment was being administered under flashlights, Pou told the magazine.

"What you have to do when resources are limited, you have to save the people you know that you can save. And not everybody is going to survive those kind of conditions. And we knew that," Pou told Newsweek.

The patients on the seventh floor were among the sickest in the hospital, Pou said. Pou administered painkillers and sedatives "to help the patients that were having pain and sedate the patients who were anxious," she acknowledged.

"Basically what we're trying to do is help the patients. Let me tell you --God strike me dead -- what we were trying to do was help the patients," she told Newsweek. "Any medicines given were for comfort. If in doing so it hastened their deaths, then that's what happened. But this was not, 'I'm going to go to the seventh floor and murder some people.' We're here to help patients."

Brescia, one of the five medical experts, said the fate of Everett troubled him the most."This one case sort of stands out to you and says to you, 'Gee, I'm not sure what happened,' " Brescia said. "And that's what I said, this particular case, if you want to use the word suspicious or unclear or whatever word you want to use, I'm not sure why this patient is dead."

Family members of another one of the patients, Elaine Nelson, hired their own forensic expert to explore why the 90-year-old woman died. The report alarmed her son, Craig, a New Orleans lawyer. "It showed that Mom had received on September 1 eight milligrams of morphine, which was four times the amount that she was prescribed by her doctor, and which was a lethal amount that was certainly enough to kill her," Nelson said. Nelson said neither he nor his sister Kathy, a registered nurse who was with their mother after Katrina until guards ordered her to leave the hospital, were called before the grand jury. Their forensic expert wasn't called either.

Nelson has filed a lawsuit against the hospital owner and others. He said he refused a settlement offer because he wants the truth to come out, especially now that Jordan has closed the case. Nelson said he is disappointed in the way the grand jury was conducted.

Joann:

I think maybe you’re thinking of the residents of that nursing home where they weren’t evacuated. THOSE “patients” did, indeed, drown. I don’t know what happened as far as prosecutions in that case.