Tenth District Court of Appeals of Ohio

The Tenth District Court of Appeals of Ohio became a key forum in the legal dispute over Billy Milligan’s continued hospitalization. Alan Goldsberry appealed a decision that kept Milligan in treatment, challenging the law applied to his case on constitutional grounds; the book records that the appeal was unsuccessful but gives little detail about the appellate court’s reasoning.

Place in the Milligan Case

The appeal followed Judge Jay Flowers’s May 20, 1981 decision to continue Milligan’s treatment at a forensic hospital. In explaining that order, Flowers relied heavily on a letter and on Dr. Lewis Lindner’s interpretation of it, concluding that Milligan lacked accepted moral restraints and disregarded human life. He also found Dr. David Caul’s unwillingness to accept court-imposed limitations made treatment at Athens Mental Health Center inadequate. Flowers described the forensic placement as the least restrictive alternative consistent with treatment goals and public safety.

The order came more than three years after Milligan’s arrest and more than two years after he had been found not guilty by reason of insanity. The institutional question was therefore not simply whether he had been mentally ill at the time of the offenses, but what legal and clinical conditions should govern his treatment afterward.

Goldsberry’s Appeal

Goldsberry immediately filed an appeal and brief with the Tenth Appellate District, the name used in the account for the court. He argued that Ohio Senate Bill 297, known as the Milligan law, denied Milligan equal protection and due process. He further contended that applying the law retroactively violated the Ohio Constitution’s protection against retroactive laws. The challenge placed the statute’s application to an individual case, rather than only its general terms, at the center of the dispute.

The appeal followed a formal finding that Milligan’s condition was diagnosed as multiple personality and that his treatment should conform to that diagnosis. The court order had also characterized him as dangerous to himself and others and in need of maximum-security hospitalization. These determinations help explain the stakes of Goldsberry’s argument: the statutory framework affected both the terms of Milligan’s confinement and the kind of treatment the court said he should receive.

Outcome and Significance

The account states that the appeals court ruled against Milligan, but does not supply the ruling’s date, legal analysis, or precise disposition. It records the consequence at the level of the broader case: the appellate result did not dislodge the treatment decision, and Milligan did not appear bitter about either the ruling or Judge Flowers’s order; the narrator instead describes him as weary of the proceedings.

The court’s role in the narrative is thus specific but consequential. It was the venue for an argument that the law governing Milligan’s post-acquittal treatment had been applied in a constitutionally impermissible way. The brief account of the loss, without a fuller exposition of the court’s reasoning, leaves the constitutional challenge visible while emphasizing how little the appeal altered Milligan’s immediate institutional situation.