The Minds of Billy Milligan

The nonfiction work The Minds of Billy Milligan documents the life and experiences of William Stanley “Billy” Milligan, opening with Milligan’s arrest and subsequent trial for the rape of three women on the Ohio State University Campus. Milligan’s case was a landmark event in two fields, law and psychiatry, providing a previously unprecedented intersection in US history. The book even explores this as one of the central themes.

Milligan’s case was a landmark event in US legal history, because he was the first person declared not guilty by reason of insanity specifically because of a diagnosis of “multiple personality disorder,” now known as dissociative identity disorder (DID). The book touches on how Milligan’s lawyers wondered whether they could win an insanity plea because at the time “multiple personality disorder” was classified as neurosis rather than psychosis. Since only the latter indicates a break from reality, even given Milligan’s eventual diagnosis of “multiple personality disorder,” his being declared not guilty by reason of insanity was a first.

The verdict in the case may have differed had events transpired at a later point in time. Shortly before Milligan’s trial began, a change of law shifted the burden of proof of insanity to the defense, rather than the burden of proof of sanity lying with the prosecution. As the book describes, Milligan’s lawyers requested that Milligan be tried under laws that existed at the time of the crime, so that all the defense had to do was present evidence of Milligan’s illness via the testimony of mental health experts; this invalidated the prosecution’s ability to prove Milligan’s sanity, allowing him to be ruled not guilty. A Columbus Dispatch article in 2007 reported that Bernard Yavitch, one of the prosecutors in the original case, believed that if the same case arose in more recent times, Milligan would have received a conviction (“Case Result Likely Would Differ Today.” The Columbus Dispatch, 2007).

Milligan’s case garnered much media attention because of the landmark verdict; hence, interest in his circumstances continued following the verdict. His treatment at the Athens Mental Health Center was heavily reported on and intensely criticized once he began receiving unsupervised furloughs from the hospital. The book describes this backlash in detail, and the Epilogue describes how it further impacted legislation. In 1980, the Ohio General Assembly enacted Senate Bill 297 to ensure “public safety” (Nagatani, Frank and Ned Nakles. “S.B. 297: Procedural Changes in Civil Commitment for Those Found to Be Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity in Ohio.” University of Dayton Law Review, vol. 6, no. 2, 1981). The law involved, among other things, handing over jurisdiction regarding commitment and release hearings from the probate court to the trial court. This increased the gap between hearings from 90 to 180 days and prohibited an individual found not guilty by reason of insanity (NGRI) from voluntary admission or discharge (Nagatani and Nakles).

Authorities claimed that the legislation was enacted as an “emergency measure” due to the public unrest surrounding Milligan’s release, but the publicity surrounding his trial undoubtedly contributed to the legislation’s enactment. Consequently, as Keyes notes in the book, the law came to be known as the “Colombus Dispatch law” or the “Milligan law.” In fact, following Milligan’s case, US courts have tended to reject the insanity plea in the context of DID. This appears to be a function of not just the changes in laws and more information emerging about DID over the years but also the public perception of and social outrage regarding Milligan’s case that followed his verdict and treatment (Kabene, Stefane M., et al. “Dissociative Identity Disorder and the Law: Guilty or Not Guilty?” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 13, 2022).