Whodunit: courts ponder guilt of defendants with multiple personalities.

Thomas Huskey claims he did not kill the four women he is accused of murdering in Knox County, Tennessee. In fact, a man named Kyle has confessed to the slayings. The problem for Huskey is that he and Kyle share the same body

Husky claims that Kyle is one of his many personalities, a separate consciousness residing in his mind, a force over whom Huskey has no control. He says he has no memory of committing the crimes.

The defense has filed in court a psychiatrist's evaluation stating that Huskey suffers from dissociative identity disorder (DID), a mental illness also known as multiple personality disorder. If Huskey's attorneys --whom a judge has barred from talking about the case--decide to use the disorder in Huskey's defense, the judge and jury in his September trial will be faced with a perplexing question: Should Thomas Huskey be held responsible for crimes allegedly committed by his evil alter ego?

In Huskey's case and a few others like it, this central question steers courts onto unfamiliar terrain, forcing them to delve into the complexities of the human mind and the hazy concept of identity. Legal and psychiatric experts have widely differing views about whether people with DID--sometimes referred to as "multiples"--should be held accountable for the actions of their "alters," leaving the courts with inconsistent guidance on the issue.

Some experts say that multiples who commit crimes should almost always be exonerated. Elyn Saks--a professor of law, psychiatry, and the behavioral sciences at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles--reaches this conclusion in her forthcoming book, Jekyll on Trial: Multiple Personality Disorder and Criminal Law.

Saks argues that an innocent "host"--the dominant personality--and innocent alters do not deserve to be punished for one alter's behavior. "The law believes there's got to be a relatively integrated consciousness in order for there to be responsibility," she said.

But Stephen Behnke, a lawyer and psychologist at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston, said he usually would find a multiple criminally responsible. "What [Saks] wants to do and what the courts have done is to confuse personalities and mental states with persons," he said.

In cases like Huskey's, "the person committed a murder," Behake said. The person "may have been experiencing a certain state of mind, but a personality doesn't commit a murder. A person commits a murder."

Swirling in the background of the DID controversy is a more general debate over the validity of the insanity defense. John Parry, director of the ABA's Commssion on Mental and Physical Disability Law, said the trend in the courts is to reject claims that mental disorders render defendants not responsible for their actions.

Generally, society and the justice system are scrutinizing criminal responsibility defenses much more rigorously," Parry said.

The accountability issue may also arise outside the criminal arena. In a Kentucky divorce case, a wife who had been diagnosed with DID received a reduced alimony award because of her extramarital affairs. Toni Tenner claimed one of her alters--one who did not know Tenner was married--had the relationships. The Kentucky Supreme Court rejected Tenner's contention that she should not be held responsible for the alter's actions. (Tenner v. Tenner, 906 S.W.2d 322 (Ky. 1995).

Tenner's attorney, Charles Brien of Benton, Kentucky, said the ruling is unfair. "This basically punishes someone for being sick," he said.

No one knows exactly how many people suffer from DID. According to the most common estimate, 1 percent of the general population has the disorder DID is officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but some psychiatrists believe the disorder does not exist. They say it is merely suggested to patients in therapy.

Thomas Nagy, a DID expert who teaches psychology at Stanford University, said people with the disorder have at least 2 distinct identities; one study showed 11 is the average, although there can be many more. Psychologists believe this fragmentation results from severe and prolonged child abuse, which the child learns to escape by dissociating, or "mentally going someplace else," said Nagy. During dissociation, new personalities are created.

The alters may or may not be aware of each other, Nagy said, and the host may or may not be able to control the actions of the other personalities. The host often cannot remember what happens when an alter takes over.

These features of the disorder are at the root of the responsibility question. DID "may be a mitigating circumstance, but it's very crucial that the person is held responsible. Otherwise you're inviting chaos," said Christine Courtois, a psychologist and clinical director of a dissociative disorder program at the Psychiatric Institute of Washington, D.C.

Her colleague at the institute, forensic psychiatrist Joan Turkus, expressed a different view. "I think it's society's responsibility to be compassionate with people who arc really ill and not criminal in the classic sense," she said. If a multiple were truly unaware that a crime was wrong, he or she would be "entitled to the use of the [insanity] defense as much as a paranoid schizophrenic."

Searching for Standards

Courts wading into this pool of conflicting opinion have struggled to stay afloat, trying to reconcile the disorder with legal principle. Although the decisions have similarities, no solid consensus has emerged about standards courts should use to assess responsibility.

Several courts have held that the key issue is whether the personality in control at the time of the crime was legally insane. These courts follow the holding of a three-judge panel in State v. Grimsley, an Ohio drunken-driving case. (444 N.E.2d 1071 (Ohio Ct. App. 1982).

"There was only one person driving the car and only one person accused of drunken driving," the court held. "It is immaterial whether she was in one state of consciousness or another, so long as in the personality then controlling her behavior, she was conscious and her actions were a product of her own volition."

The Hawaii Supreme Court followed that reasoning two years later but added a requirement that all the defendant's personalities be evaluated separately to determine each alter's sanity. Several experts had examined the defendant, an alleged rapist, and each one identified a different personality as the one who committed the crime. (State v. Rodrigues, 679 P.2d 615 (Haw. 1984).

"That's nutty," said Behnke, the Boston lawyer-psychologist. "That's just crazy. The courts need to get out of that quagmire."

A more recent ruling departed from the view that courts should look at the personality in control at the time of the crime. In a case in which a woman with DID was accused of kidnapping a newborn from a hospital, the 10th Circuit focused instead on the host personality. It held that a defendant with DID could be found not guilty if the evidence showed that the host was not complicit in the crime. (U.S. v. Denny-Shaffer, 2 F.3d 999 (10th Cir. 1993).

All these decisions "make the same mistake," said Behnke--that is, failing to see the defendant as a single individual. The better approach, he said, is to "look at one person and at their mental state at the time of the act. If they couldn't appreciate the nature and wrongfulness of the act and they couldn't control their impulses," then the person should not be held accountable.

"I believe in dissociation and that people can be deeply fragmented," Behnke added. "But no matter how fragmented a person is, it is still a single person. I know of no precedent in law or psychology for thinking of an individual as more than one person."

Nevertheless, defendants with DID continue to ask the courts to see them, literally, as multiples. "Alters are not real people, but they feel like they are," said Stanford's Nagy.

Thomas Huskey's lawyers are clearly treating his alters as real people. Earlier this year, they asked the judge in the case to allow separate legal representation for each of his several personalities. The judge denied the motion.