Those are pictures from today of an article about Billy Milligan.
This is the Web address for the article:
www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/12/16/1216-billy-milligan-dies.html
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I think it's telling that the result of the case, according to the article, "led to Ohio changing its law so that the defense had a greater burden to prove insanity."
If I were the judge for that case, and willing to entertain the notion of a defense based on multiple personality disorder, I think that I would have considered offering the defendant multiple sentences; at least one for each of the defendant's personalities. I would have considered it my judicial and social responsibility to thus administer equal treatment under the law.
The article doesn't say which personality attacked the three women. How was each crime committed? Did the "lesbian named Adalana" attack the women, or did she merely get close enough to them without making them suspicious that "a Yugoslavian man named Ragen" could then take over Milligan's mind and commit the kidnappings, robberies and rapes? The latter would imply a very obliging lesbian; I thought that the personalities in multiple personality disorder usually aren't aware of each other's existence. It's also interesting that the male, criminal personality presumably had an accent, which would make it easier for a Milligan personality without an accent not to be identified. If I were the prosecutor for that case, I would have considered charging Ragen with kidnapping, robbery and rape and Adalana with being an accomplice to those crimes, unless the defense lawyer tried to argue that Adalana had raped the women, having repeatedly snapped from the psychological burden of having what she must have thought to be an abnormally large clitoris.
What a miracle of modern medicine it was that Mr. Milligan's personalities "had fused" only ten years after he was committed to a series of mental hospitals instead of going to jail. If I were a male, psychiatric patient, I wouldn't have much felt like transforming into a lesbian personality in a ward full of other disturbed men, either.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, March 17, 2015 @ 2:21 p.m./edited @ 2:25 p.m.
