Notes:
This case will likely be remembered more for its status as a media circus than for its jurisprudential significance. Nevertheless, it serves to illustrate the ways in which questions about the agency, identity, and responsibility of multiples do not stop once the multiples refrain from committing crimes. In particular, this case raises the question of whether and how an alter can assent to sex using a body all the alters share (think back to Barb's relationship to her husband). Similar questions can be raised about other kinds of consent. Can alters make contracts? Should they be sworn in separately? Must the confidentiality of each alter be respected by doctors and therapists? These questions are complicated, of course, by longstanding questions about the relationship between sanity and responsibility more generally. The strange and dramatic nature of <span class="caps">DID</span>, however, makes them all the more acute.