Ohio state department of mental health and mental retardation

The Ohio state department of mental health and mental retardation is presented less through a description of its formal structure than through the consequences of its authority over state psychiatric facilities and patient transfers. In Billy Milligan’s case, the department’s decisions helped determine whether he would remain in a treatment setting in Athens, move to maximum-security institutions, or return to a forensic unit in Columbus. Its actions repeatedly intersected with court orders, prosecutors’ demands, and disputes over what treatment his diagnosis required.

Authority and the Lima transfer

The department’s intervention became conspicuous in 1979, when Milligan was confined at Athens Mental Health Center and the possibility of moving him to a more restrictive institution was under public and political pressure. A newspaper report cited a reliable source who said that officials at the department’s headquarters in Columbus had made several calls to the Athens hospital on the Wednesday before Milligan’s transfer. The report attributed at least one call to Mental Health Director Timothy Moritz. Two state legislators, Mike Stinziano and Claire “Buzz” Ball, Jr., had repeatedly criticized what they regarded as lenient treatment, and both praised the transfer once it occurred. The account links the calls and the political complaints in time, but it presents the details about the calls through an attributed source rather than as a public explanation from the department.

The immediate legal step was taken by Judge Jones, who granted the attorney general’s motion to send Milligan to Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane after hearing evidence concerning an attempted escape from a vehicle. On October 4, 1979, Milligan was taken from Athens to Lima in restraints, with no opportunity to say goodbye to anyone except Dr. David Caul. The sequence distinguishes the department’s reported influence from the judge’s formal order: state officials were said to have intervened, while the court authorized the transfer.

Treatment orders and institutional conflict

At Lima, the dispute was not simply over the level of security. Milligan’s advocates objected that hospital officials were not following Judge Kinworthy’s order to treat him as a person with multiple personality. Alan Goldsberry and Steve Thompson filed a contempt-of-court motion against the Lima authorities and the department, and pressed the state mental health director’s office to move Milligan to a less restrictive hospital. The department was therefore both part of the administrative system responsible for his placement and a target of legal efforts seeking to enforce the court’s treatment directive.

The conflict continued after a December 10, 1979 court finding that Milligan had a mental illness diagnosed as multiple personality and that his condition posed substantial risks to himself and others while making hospital treatment necessary. At a review hearing on April 14, 1980, Judge Kinworthy dismissed the contempt charges against Lima’s superintendent and clinical director and ordered Milligan to remain there. That ruling left the placement in place; it did not erase the broader argument over whether confinement and treatment were being handled consistently with the diagnosis and court findings.

Transfers during institutional change

In October 1980, the department announced that Lima would be phased out as a state hospital for the criminally insane and converted to a prison under the Department of Correction. The planned change made Milligan’s future placement an immediate issue. Prosecutor Jim O’Grady sought a sanity-review hearing in Columbus under a new law, in part because a transfer to Athens or another minimum-security hospital was being considered. The hearing was postponed from October 31 to November 7.

During that delay, department officials told O’Grady that they had decided to send Milligan to the newly opened Dayton Forensic Center. Its security arrangements were described as more stringent than those of most prisons. The prosecutor then withdrew his demand for a hearing. Milligan arrived at Dayton on November 19, 1980. The department’s decision thus altered the proposed route through the courts: instead of the anticipated hearing on a less restrictive placement, he was moved to another maximum-security facility before the hearing took place.

A later proposed transfer followed a different procedural path. In 1981, the department, the prosecutor, and the judge agreed that a move from Dayton to the Central Ohio Regional Forensic Unit would be an internal transfer between two maximum-security hospitals and would not require a court hearing. The department’s agreement made the move possible without a new hearing, although the process was slow. After an episode in which Milligan volunteered for seclusion because he feared he might jeopardize the transfer, he was transferred to the Columbus unit on September 22 in a wheelchair. The account records the circumstances and outcome without suggesting that the department itself directed the incident in seclusion.

Financial claim and institutional significance

Shortly after the Columbus transfer, the department sued Milligan for $50,000, seeking payment for his involuntary hospitalization and treatment at Athens, Lima, and Dayton. His attorneys countersued, seeking damages for murals he had painted on Lima’s walls and alleging physical abuse and malpractice. The countersuit was denied, while the state’s claim remained pending in the account’s epilogue. The litigation extended the conflict from questions of diagnosis and placement to responsibility for the costs of care and the conditions under which it had been delivered.

Across these episodes, the department’s role was consequential but not identical to that of the clinicians or courts. Clinicians and court-appointed evaluators supplied medical judgments; judges issued legal orders; prosecutors sought hearings or transfers; and the department participated in decisions about state facilities and movement between them. The distinction matters in Milligan’s case because a diagnosis did not by itself determine his liberty or treatment setting. Administrative decisions could redirect his placement, while court rulings could authorize, review, or constrain what followed.