Ohio Senate Bill 297

Ohio Senate Bill 297 altered how people found not guilty by reason of insanity could seek transfer to a less restrictive setting and how often their status would be reviewed. Passed amid public controversy over William Stanley Milligan’s hospitalization, the law became known as both the Milligan law and the Columbus Dispatch law; its later application to Milligan prompted a constitutional challenge.

Provisions and Legislative Background

During 1979, the Ohio legislature considered changes to the laws governing people found not guilty by reason of insanity. Under the proposed procedure described in the account, before such a person could move to a less restrictive environment, the county prosecutor could demand a hearing in the jurisdiction where the crime had been committed. The interval for the patient’s review would change from every 90 days to every 180 days, and the hearings would be open to the public, the press, and television. These provisions altered both the route to a less restrictive placement and the frequency and visibility of review.

The law acquired two public names: the Milligan law and the Columbus Dispatch law. Bernie Yavitch, the prosecutor in Milligan’s case, later said he had served on the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association subcommittee that drafted the legislation. He described the drafting as a response to the outcry over the Milligan situation. Judge Jay Flowers likewise told the book’s author that the law had been passed because of William Stanley Milligan. These accounts connect the legislation to the controversy, while identifying different participants’ perspectives on its origins.

Ohio Senate Bill 297 passed and took effect on May 20, 1980. Its provisions therefore entered an ongoing legal and clinical dispute about Milligan’s hospitalization, rather than resolving the underlying disagreement over his diagnosis or treatment.

The Case Behind the Law

The controversy had developed through distinct legal questions. In January 1978, while Milligan was in prison, his public defenders arranged for clinical psychologist Willis C. Driscoll to evaluate him. Driscoll’s report described Milligan as unable at that time to understand events or assist in his own defense and urged hospitalization. On January 19, the defense presented the report to Judge Jay Flowers as evidence that Milligan could not help with his defense. That inquiry concerned his present capacity to participate in proceedings, not whether he was criminally responsible when the charged acts occurred.

At Milligan’s later stipulated-evidence trial, Judge Flowers dismissed the first rape count for lack of corroborating evidence and a similar pattern of conduct. On counts two through ten, the judge found that the medical evidence established mental illness at the time of the offenses, an inability to distinguish right from wrong, and an inability to refrain from the acts. He therefore found Milligan not guilty by reason of insanity. That verdict addressed responsibility at the time of the offenses; it did not settle the separate question of where Milligan should receive treatment afterward.

On December 10, 1979, a court found Milligan mentally ill under the statutory standard, diagnosed his condition as multiple personality, and ordered hospitalization. Its findings cited risks to himself and others as well as a need for hospital treatment. The later legislative changes concerned review and placement procedures for people in this legal category; the diagnosis and placement findings in Milligan’s case remained matters of separate clinical and judicial judgment.

Application and Legal Challenge

The new law figured in the subsequent dispute over Milligan’s placement. On May 20, 1981, Judge Jay Flowers ordered continued treatment at Dayton, relying in part on a letter entered as evidence and on Lewis Lindner’s interpretation of it. He also considered testimony from David Caul that Caul would not accept court-imposed limitations, and concluded that Athens Mental Health Center was inadequate. The order followed the effective date of Ohio Senate Bill 297 by a year, and Flowers’s stated reasons included evidence and testimony specific to Milligan’s case.

Alan Goldsberry appealed immediately. He argued that applying the law to Milligan denied equal protection and due process and that its retroactive application violated the Ohio Constitution’s protection against retroactive laws. The account reports that the appeal was ultimately decided against Milligan, but does not provide a detailed appellate ruling on each argument. The challenge thus centered not only on the law’s procedures, but on whether those procedures could govern a case already shaped by earlier findings and orders.

Significance

Ohio Senate Bill 297 sits at the intersection of diagnosis, criminal responsibility, and post-verdict hospitalization. Milligan’s inability to assist in his defense, his mental state at the time of the offenses, and the later decision about his treatment setting were related questions, but they were not interchangeable legal determinations. The chronology makes that distinction consequential: an insanity verdict did not itself guarantee a less restrictive placement, while review and transfer could be affected by a law publicly associated with the very case under review.

The law’s names preserve the pressure surrounding its passage. Yavitch recalled an outcry; Flowers explicitly linked the legislation to Milligan. Its procedural changes also made later placement hearings more frequent or less frequent depending on the provision at issue, and more exposed to public and media scrutiny. The ensuing constitutional appeal made retroactivity a central concern: a rule adopted amid a prominent case was being invoked in that case after earlier judicial decisions had already established a diagnosis, found grounds for hospitalization, and addressed criminal responsibility.