In January of 1992, when then presidential candidate Bill Clinton showed up at a Rainbow Coalition conference having just executed a Black convict with the IQ of a retarded person, I felt that it was a political stunt laced with blatant immorality, done at the expense of a Black person. This led me to think how many Blacks have suffered from mental illnesses, but have been treated by the system as knowing criminals, conscious and sane and therefore, fully responsible for their crimes?

The state of Georgia recently had a bout of conscience when it temporarily stayed the execution of Alexander Williams IV, a Black male who murdered a teenage girl in 1986. They will review his situation, which his lawyers say clearly reflects that Williams has been suffering from severe case of chronic paranoid schizophrenia for a considerable period of time. He believes that actress Sigorney Weaver is God, sees little red men in people�s eyes, and says that rats are beamed into his cell. The view of some is that the state is so intent upon executing Williams that they may be willing to put him into a treatment regime, only to execute him later if or when he becomes more fully conscious of his crime, since the Supreme Court has ruled individuals who were unable to understand the charges against them or follow the proceedings could not be executed.

Match this against the trial of Andrea Yates, a White woman in Houston, Texas who killed all five of her children. Although I believe that she had to be insane, what is interesting is the length that the system is willing to go to. Her trial has been a spectacle, due to the horrible image of the way in which these children died and the speculation about why she did it.

I have seen this speculation played out before, by a public in seeming disbelief that the person could commit such a crime. And it is reasonable to believe that part of the disbelief is based on the stereotype that some people are capable of committing such crimes, but other people are not. We know who the "other people" are, because the end result of the speculation and the length the system will go to is that the criminal deed is humanized. In the attempt to understand it, long poignant articles are written, outlining the biography of the person in detail and scrupulously analyzing their mental history.

Why do I say this?

There is the current case in the District of Columbia Superior Court of Charrisise Blackmond, a 33 year-old Black mother who killed her child, Brianna. The mother regresses into child-like behavior, sucking her thumb and is not able to read beyond the first grade level. Yet, the judge recently ruled that she is competent to stand trial, being only "mildly retarded," despite the view of her lawyers that she is unable to follow the legal proceedings against her. Her future can be predicted.

Nevertheless, this dichotomy which allows the criminal treatment of the Black mentally ill and the hospitalization of the White mentally ill has a long history. For example, I wondered why when Colin Ferguson, a Black male, went on a shooting rampage in 1993 on a Long Island commuter train that left 19 people injured, it was so difficult for people to see that this was obviously an ordinary case of insanity. However, Ferguson was treated like a sane Black nationalist committing revolution, even though he claimed that the shooter was a White man who had stolen his gun while he was asleep. The bizarre behavior continued when he fired his attorneys at his trial. Ferguson is in jail.

But guess what? John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981, has been cleared by officials at Washington, D.C.�s St. Elizabeth�s psychiatric hospital, to take day trips out of the hospital to visit family and friends. Hinkley shot Reagan in order to impress an actress Jodie Foster and probably because he shot a president, it prompted a series of long, searching analyses of his past that revealed a pattern of mental illness. And although admittedly the crimes are not the same, should Hinkley continue to improve he could gain even more freedom, but Alexander Williams IV could eventually be executed?

(Ronald Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar and professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. His latest book is "African American Leadership.")