Athens County Court of Common Pleas

The Athens County Court of Common Pleas is the forum in which the state secured the transfer of William Stanley Milligan from Athens Mental Health Center to Lima State Hospital. Its importance in this episode lies not in deciding the original criminal case, but in exercising authority over where Milligan would be held after an escape attempt: a short hearing turned testimony about institutional security into an order that changed his place of confinement.

Role in the Transfer Proceeding

The court appears in the account when Assistant Attorney General David Belinky filed a motion on behalf of the state of Ohio to transfer Milligan to Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The motion followed an attempted escape from the Athens hospital’s Admissions and Intensive Treatment unit. The proceeding therefore concerned the state’s requested change in placement, rather than a new trial on the charges that had brought Milligan into the criminal justice system.

The hearing also exposed a dispute over Milligan’s opportunity to participate. His attorney, Alan Goldsberry, asked Judge Roger J. Jones for time to consult with his client. Goldsberry argued that Milligan had a right to know about the motion and, under the second paragraph of 5122.20, to be told that he could request an immediate hearing. Because Milligan had not received that notice, Goldsberry asked that he be allowed a hearing in his presence. Judge Jones disagreed. The episode thus presents the court not simply as a location for the state’s evidence, but as the authority that determined whether the requested transfer would proceed despite the defense’s procedural objection.

Evidence and the Court’s Decision

Belinky called one witness: Russell Cremeans, chief of Security and Safety at the Athens Mental Health Center. In response to questions about recent physical assaults involving Milligan and hospital personnel, Cremeans referred to reports from an aide, M. Wilson, and the officer on duty that night, Clyde Barnhart. He identified the incident as occurring on September 26, 1979, and said he was concerned about whether Milligan could be contained on the locked unit.

Cremeans’s testimony then addressed the practical limits of the institution’s security. Asked whether the hospital could hold Milligan if he intended to leave the grounds, he said he had serious reservations. He described Milligan and another patient, Gus Holston, breaking down the door of the receiving unit where they were housed. A chair was used to break the lock on a fire-escape door, and the two men went down the fire escape in an attempt to leave without authorization.

The account continued from the fire escape to the parking lot. Milligan had a vehicle there that had been brought back from an earlier unauthorized absence. He unlocked it and entered, but was prevented from getting in further; he and Holston then ran over a hill. Three men subdued Milligan and returned him to Ward 5. These details made the state’s argument concrete: the testimony concerned not only a breach of a locked unit, but movement toward a vehicle and the difficulty of preventing departure from the grounds.

After hearing Cremeans, Judge Jones granted the attorney general’s motion to send Milligan to Lima. The book reports no competing witness called by the defense or further explanation from the judge in this hearing. The decision, as narrated, rests immediately on the security chief’s account and his stated concern that Athens could not hold Milligan if he chose to leave.

Consequences and Institutional Boundaries

The order had an immediate physical consequence. At two o’clock on October 4, 1979, Milligan was handcuffed and belt-shackled and driven 180 miles to Lima State Hospital. He had no time to say goodbye to anyone except Dr. David Caul. The journey marked a sharp transition from treatment at Athens to confinement at a more restrictive institution; the court’s ruling was the point at which that change became compulsory.

The court’s role should be distinguished from the later judicial findings made in a separate proceeding. On December 10, 1979, the Allen County Court of Common Pleas Probate Division found Milligan mentally ill, identified his condition as multiple personality, and ordered hospitalization at Lima consistent with that diagnosis. Those findings belong to the later Allen County proceeding, not to Judge Jones’s transfer hearing. In the Athens proceeding described here, the immediate question was whether Milligan should be moved; the account does not present Judge Jones as making the later formal diagnostic findings.

That distinction gives the Athens court’s appearance particular significance. Clinical descriptions and treatment needs formed part of Milligan’s wider institutional history, but the transfer decision was narrated through testimony about escape, containment, and security. The court’s action translated an account of a specific breach—the chair, the fire-escape door, the car, and the flight over the hill—into a consequential change in custody. Its authority is shown through that concrete result, while the defense’s request for notice and a hearing in Milligan’s presence remains part of the contested process that preceded it.