Justice's Many Faces

CRIMINAL JUSTICE, so often little more than a campaign plank for aspiring politicians, has drawn less attention than ever under the conservative revolution. Across the nation, jail populations are swelling, as political rhetoric has stressed the "lock 'em up and throw away the keys" approach. Lower court judges anxious for reappointment by elected officials have stepped up jail terms and bail appraisals. In city halls from New York to San Francisco, local David Stockmans have slashed budgets for prison upkeep and inmate care; criminals after all, don't vote. In the eyes of America's political leaders, as long as jails keep criminals farawayfrom potential voters, the care of America's legal outcasts can easily be sacrificed to budget-cutting convenience.

Take New York City. The already swarming Rikers Island "correctional facility," 99 per cent full to capacity a year ago, is now crowded more than 10 per cent above its formal limits. Yet Mayor Edward Koch continues to blast "soft judges" who refuse to lock up all offenders. Meanwhile, Koch, who will romp to re-election this year, has cut back the budgets of the few departments designed to ease inmates back into society--Probation, Parole, and Mental Health. Sadly, Americans everywhere--obsessed by only political issues of the self, like interest rates--have taken no notice of the horror that we call the criminal "justice" system.

The Minds of Billy Milligan is not, strictly speaking, a crusade for prison reform or compassion for criminals. But Daniel Keyes' psychological narrative has that effect, unmistakably. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, Keyes paints a terrifying picture of the mental and legal predicament of one William Stanley Milligan, a 22-year-old Ohioan accused of three 1977 rapes on the campus of Ohio State University.

Milligan committed the crimes; the evidence was incontrovertible. But his bizarre psychological state made a fair judicial verdict excruciatingly difficult to render. Milligan, you see, was found to have 24 distinct personalities within him, each one motivating him in different directions--a case of multiple personality never before diagnosed. Some of his personalities were harmless, others just bizarre. But when one, Ragen (Milligan had different first names for each personality) surfaced, Milligan became "the keeper of hate"--and a rapist.

From the moment police charged Milligan with the rapes--which he did not recall, since he was dominated at the time of arrest by his central personality, Billy--a year-long struggle between prosecutors and psychiatrists ensued. No one suspected the extent of his mental disorder at first; as Keyes tells it, a chorus of citizens' groups and police, spurred on by sensationalist reporters, called for life imprisonment for Milligan, who appeared a stereotypical rapist: a lonely young man with family problems and a history of trouble with women.

But then new facts began to emerge. Two psychiatric experts picked up on Milligan's case and secured a series of interviews with the confused defendant; almost immediately, they realized Milligan's mental state was different, very different, from anything they had ever encountered. Depending on the setting he was in--and on other factors the doctors couldn't pin-point--Milligan would lapse into different personalities. While in his main phase--in which he referred to himself as "Billy"--Milligan could and often did allude to feelings of his other personalities (to whom he referred as a detached observer); his memory of actions those other "Milligans" took was, however, murky at best. Increasingly, the doctors came to feel it would be grossly unjust to imprison Billy Milligan like a common rapist. Milligan had been unaware of the actions he had committed as madman "Ragen," almost as if he were under the influence of a potent drug.

Aware that their discovery could help Milligan's upcoming case in court, the doctors publicized their contention that Milligan had multiple personalities. That tactic proved an error; newspapers and get-tough advocates immediately went berserk. Milligan, they said, was faking his disorder (though other psychiatrists had since confirmed it); the young man, they argued, was simply adept at putting on 24 different acts (though sophisticated tests actually proved him to have dramatically different IQs and values when dominated by different personalities). And, as Keyes laboriously shows, his personalities were diverse.

There was Ragen, the psychotic and angry rapist; Arthur, a rational and emotionless Englishman (replete with accent): Allen, the con man; Danny, the frightened adolescent; Adalana, the introverted lesbian (three of his personalities were female); Philip, the thug; Kevin, the planner; Walter, the Australian big-game hunter; Lee, the comedian; Bobby, the daydreamer; and some 14 others. By securing the confidence of Milligan's main incarnation, Billy, the doctors elicited from the defendant information about each of his personalities.

Milligan, it turned out, had been born with a throat disorder that almost killed him as a tot; from then on, his childhood went downhill. His troubled father committed suicide; his stepfather, a taskmaster, alternately beat him and raped him. Milligan could never relate to women and was often taunted by schoolmates; in a trance, he once revealed to the psychiatrists that he thought himself insane as a teenager. His abundance of negative experiences, the analysts found, gave birth to Milligan's two dozen incarnations. The problem was, no one else believed them, and there was no legal precent for a finding of "not guilty" of a major crime by reason of insanity because of multiple personality.

After a drawn-out legal battle sensationalized by the local and national press, Milligan won--for a while. He was found not guilty and committed to a top-drawer mental health institution, just as his attorneys had requested. But ambitious politicians--the same sort who needlessly shuttle off marginal offenders to America's jails today--were out to reverse that decision. A higher court recently recommended that Milligan be sent to maximum security prison where he and his tattered family would be responsible for providing for his desperately needed psychiatric care. And shortly after the "not guilty" verdict, the Ohio state legislature passed what legislators frankly called "the Milligan law." That unfortunate statute, approved by shortsighted politicians watching opinion surveys and not paying attention to the rights of the mentally ill, severely limits mental illness pleas in criminal cases. If the statute stands, dozens of Billy Milligans--with conditions less severe, perhaps, but demanding no less pressing treatment--could find themselves in hellholes of maximum security prisons for crimes they did not rationally will.

In painting his terrifying portrait of the fight waged on behalf of Milligan by lawyers and mental health experts to get him special treatment and a "not guilty" verdict, Keyes, unfortunately, downplays larger issues. Chief among these are the extent to which psychiatric problems should be allowed to change verdicts and the timeless dilemma of how to prevent judges and politicians from ignoring individual rights for their own aggrandizement or ambition. This is his principal flaw in an otherwise excellently researched and explained study. Keyes focuses heavily on Milligan's psychological composition and how it developed into a condition that spurred three rapes; his is as thoughtful an anatomy of a criminal as one could hope to find.

Perhaps if judges and elected officials were more aware of the psychological complexities of many men convicted of major crimes today, they would be less prone to hurling suspects into maximum security houses. Perhaps they would see that it is not always caprice or greed or malice that spark felonies, but grown psychological problems, often instilled at birth and magnified by years of social ostracization. America's prisons could stop masquerading as "correctional facilities," and start addressing the real problems--social and psychiatric--that lead men to crime