Roger J. Jones

Roger J. Jones enters the account through a consequential judicial decision: he authorized William Stanley Milligan’s removal from the Athens hospital to Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The order followed a proceeding in which Milligan’s lawyer argued that his client had not been properly notified and could not participate, while the state presented testimony about recent events at the hospital. The later appeal condemned the procedure but did not undo the transfer, leaving Jones’s ruling at the intersection of institutional safety and a patient’s right to be heard.

Judicial Role and Setting

Jones presided in the Athens County Court of Common Pleas during a dispute over where Milligan would be held and treated after an earlier finding that he was not guilty by reason of insanity. The state’s motion was not a new trial on the underlying charges: Assistant Attorney General David Belinky sought to move Milligan from the Athens Mental Health Center to Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The immediate question before Jones was the proposed transfer and the state’s evidence concerning Milligan’s conduct and risk in the hospital setting.

The timing gave the proceeding urgency. The state’s motion came after a reported attempt by Milligan and fellow patient Gus Holston to leave the hospital’s receiving unit. Hospital security chief Russell Cremeans testified that the patients had broken a door lock using a chair, gone down a fire escape, and reached a parking lot where Milligan attempted to enter a vehicle. Staff prevented him from getting into the car, and three men later subdued him and returned him to Ward 5. These reports supplied the concrete grounds the state presented for seeking a more secure placement.

The Hearing and Transfer Order

Milligan’s attorney, Alan Goldsberry, asked Jones for time to confer with his client. He argued that Milligan was entitled to know about the state’s motion and, under the second paragraph of section 5122.20, to be advised that he could request an immediate hearing. Goldsberry further asked that Milligan have the right to attend. His objection therefore concerned not only the destination proposed by the state, but also whether Milligan could understand and contest the proceeding before a decision was made.

Jones rejected Goldsberry’s request. Belinky then called Cremeans as the state’s only witness. The resulting record, as presented in the account, centered on Cremeans’s reports of recent incidents and his concern about keeping Milligan in the locked unit. After hearing that evidence, Jones granted the attorney general’s motion to send Milligan to Lima. The ruling converted the state’s account of a hospital escape attempt into an order for placement at a distant institution; it also left unresolved, in that hearing, the defense’s demand that Milligan be present and able to respond.

The order was carried out on October 4, 1979. Milligan was handcuffed and secured with a belt shackle, and was driven 180 miles to Lima State Hospital. He had no time to say goodbye to anyone except Dr. David Caul. The abrupt departure made the practical consequence of Jones’s ruling unmistakable: Milligan’s treatment and confinement shifted from Athens to a more restrictive institution, while his opportunity to participate in the transfer proceeding had been disputed from the outset.

Appellate Review

The Fourth District Court of Appeals of Ohio later examined the procedure by which Jones had authorized the transfer. On April 21, 1981, it held that removing a patient from a less restrictive setting without notice to him or his family, without allowing him to attend or consult counsel, and without permitting him to call witnesses or exercise the rights of a full hearing constituted a fatal procedural violation requiring reversal of the transfer order. The opinion directly challenged the process followed in Jones’s court, rather than treating the fact of Milligan’s hospitalization as proof that the process had been adequate.

The appellate court nevertheless declined to return Milligan to Athens. It reasoned that the procedural error was not prejudicial because a later proceeding in Allen County had found, on evidence the appellate court presumed sufficient, that Milligan was a danger to himself and others. Thus the court distinguished between the unlawfulness of the original transfer procedure and the separate evidence supporting continued confinement. Goldsberry and Steve Thompson subsequently appealed that decision to the Supreme Court of Ohio, but the account does not give the outcome of that appeal.

Significance and Limits of the Record

Jones’s role is defined less by a personal profile than by the consequences and later review of one order. The hearing placed a security concern—the reported escape attempt—beside a procedural objection about notice, counsel, attendance, and the ability to present evidence. Jones accepted the state’s request after hearing its sole witness, despite Goldsberry’s request for time and a hearing with Milligan present. The appellate court later found that omission legally decisive enough to invalidate the order, even though it allowed the confinement to continue on a different basis.

That distinction matters to the larger account of Milligan’s movement through psychiatric institutions. A finding of mental illness, a decision about the proper level of security, and the procedural rights owed in making that decision were related questions, but they were not interchangeable. The appellate ruling did not establish that the transfer was unnecessary; it held that the original route to it violated required procedure, then concluded that a later hearing supplied an independent basis for leaving Milligan at Lima. Jones’s decision therefore remains consequential precisely because its procedural defect did not produce the practical remedy of a return to Athens.