The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  One story that especially troubled him was the news from Japan of an earthquake, a tsunami, and now a nuclear disaster. He had an idea to offer, though he figured that Michael was probably in no position to do anything about it. What if they let some Death Row prisoners like him go over there and into the contaminated zones, where they could work to contain the leakage? “Why be foolish and not send us to do the task at hand … willingly and with pride.”

  THE NEWCOMERS IN Stroman’s life could be a little too credulous. Having come into his life when they did, they could minimize his darkness. Stroman’s sister Doris didn’t personally know most of these do-gooder types who had fallen in love with her brother, but she knew of them and got a good laugh thinking about them. She loved her brother, but she loved him with eyes wide open, knowing everything she knew, knowing what he was and what he’d never be. These people—Ilan Ziv, the pen pals, the blog readers—they seemed to her to be begging Mark to con them.

  Ever since the trial, but before it, too, Doris and Mary had believed that Stroman would say anything to save himself. He wasn’t your regular criminal. He was a cunning one.

  The sisters rattled off the misinformation they had heard in the news or from Mark’s lawyers or at the trial. Their mother couldn’t have had Mark at age fifteen, Doris said: “That means she would have had me at age nine.” Further: “There was one thing that I read, that his mother was found in a ditch pregnant. That’s not true.” They said it was the same thing with the sister in the World Trade Center: “There wasn’t one.” Doris denied that Wallace had hit them, although her exoneration contained a different accusation: “He never beat any of us. But I was sexually abused by him.” Mary denied that Wallace was a heavy drinker, though Doris remembered otherwise: “I remember he used to drink those tall ones.” Mark wasn’t the victim in school, Mary said: “My brother was not bullied. He bullied.” Nor, she said, had Mark run away to their grandparents eleven times—maybe once or twice. The sisters questioned whether Mark and Tena were ever legally married: “I’ve never seen a marriage license,” Mary said. She denied that Mark had inherited any of his racism from the family: “My stepfather was not a racist. Neither was my mother. Or me or my sister.” They dismissed claims she’d heard attributed to Mark that they had a pet monkey named Tarzan as children. Nor did they buy the 9/11 warrior thing: they just saw their brother as a screwed-up, possibly brain-damaged or bipolar guy with an untreated drug problem.

  Though she accused him of many fibs, Mary was particularly exercised about Mark’s self-depiction as a motorcycle man: “He claimed to ride, but he didn’t. He loved Harleys, but he never had a bike. I had a bike. He never had a bike.” She added, “I tell you, I think there was something wrong with my brother’s mind. I think he lied so much, he believed what he lied.”

  She continued, “It was always hard with my brother, because he was such a good con man. He could tell you something and make you believe it. So it’s hard for me to believe anything that came out of his mouth, just because he always conned his way out of everything.”

  Doris thought Mark had figured out what these kindly liberals helping him wanted to hear. She did believe, from what she gathered by letter and on occasional visits, that he was becoming a better man at Polunsky: “He was going back to the old Mark—the kindhearted Mark,” Doris said. What made her wary was how her brother had become a vessel for all his helpers’ ideas about the world. Perhaps they needed to believe Mark had changed in order to recoup a respectable return on their investment of time and feeling.

  Doris was right that the people who had grown fond of Stroman saw him through their own lenses, tinted or smudged as they might be. They tended to fixate on the idea of his abusive childhood and awful parents. They seemed to see a man whose choices they judged to be less real than their own had been—a victimizer who, if you looked more closely, was a victim of his circumstances. They flirted, as his sisters resisted doing, with the idea that Stroman was not wholly his own problem—that his failure was also somehow ours.

  To Doris and Mary, their brother was a remarkable shape-shifter who knew how to promote himself. He had become almost like a brand, with a small but fanatic cult of consumers. Doris realized this when she went online, on Facebook and elsewhere, and left comments trying to correct the record. She claims to have received a death threat over the phone not long thereafter—“All of you are gonna die,” the person said—as well as a great deal of backlash from other Internet surfers, who were defensive of Mark’s reputation.

  Doris and Mary, of course, had their own biases. Some time ago, they had told Ilan Ziv a very different story than this one, portraying their childhood in considerably bleaker terms. They seemed cannier now, and determined to prevent any of Mark’s reputation from spilling on them. “I truly believe he’s a sick man,” Mary said, “and I’ll always believe that. And the system failed him.”

  ON JANUARY 20, 2011, Mark Stroman’s lawyer paid him a visit at Polunsky, bearing some long-awaited news. The system had decided that Stroman would die on July 13 of that year.

  Less than a month later, Stroman received a letter from the state. He opened it during the recreation hour, and as he began to read the death warrant, which graciously added an extra week to his life, he couldn’t stop “laughing like a crazy man,” perhaps out of fear, perhaps at the absurdity of receiving a letter from your own government informing you that it plans to kill you:

  It is hereby ordered that the defendant, Mark Anthony Stroman, who has been adjudged to be guilty of capital murder as charged in the indictment and whose punishment has been assessed by the verdict of the jury and judgment of the court at death, shall be kept in custody by the director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Institutional Division, until the 20th day of July, 2011, upon which day, at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Institutional Division, at some time after the hour of six o’clock p.m., in a room arranged for the purpose of execution, the said director, acting by and through the executioner designated by the director, as provided by law, is hereby commanded, ordered and directed to carry out this sentence of death by intravenous injection of a substance or substances in a lethal quantity sufficient to cause the death of the said Mark Anthony Stroman until the said Mark Anthony Stroman is Dead.

  Ten days later, he was minding his business in his cell, typing a letter to his attorney, when two guards showed up at the door. They said Stroman was wanted at the major’s office. As he walked down the hallway, it felt different from before: he could see people talking but couldn’t hear them; the only sounds were the blood pulsing in his head and his own footsteps. Awaiting him in the office was a stack of papers: all the forms he had to fill out to get to the next round, so to speak. Everything around him seemed to echo; the world was swirling in slow motion. He returned to the cell with the packet of death. The men around him were unusually silent. No screaming, no barking, just some quiet acknowledgment: “I receive a few silent nods of the head, which we are all aware of in this place of death meaning ‘take care’ and good luck,” Stroman wrote. He packed up his things, had a last turn at recreation with his buddy Olsen, and then migrated to his new death watch cell, where they kept prisoners awaiting imminent execution under closer scrutiny. He felt like some kind of reality-TV star, with that camera staring at him from the wall. The unit had four death watch cells. When you were placed in one of them, you could safely assume two things: that someone else had just died, vacating a spot; and that you were going to die before long.

  Stroman knew that everything that happened now might be for the last time. Earlier that month, for example, he had savored what he knew might be his last encounter with rain, and then written about it. Out he went with his friend Olsen to the rec cage. He had heard of an arctic blast aiming its wrath at Texas, but it was supposed to be in the sixties still, so the men wore shorts and T-shirts. A faint drizzle blessed them, and Stroman savored its smell. Then the drizzle exploded into a torrent. The temperature plunged,
and it felt a lot like that arctic blast that was supposed to be far away still. The lights above them began to gyrate. The wind, which almost never came down into their high-walled cage, ducked and thrashed the men. It was the first time Stroman remembered feeling wind in nine years. The rain blew in every direction. “We laugh like two little kids enjoying our morning time,” Stroman recalled. After twenty minutes or so, he and Olsen were numb, and the guard accompanied them back inside.

  Stroman headed for the showers at once: “I undress and am instantly hit with the hot water and my whole body tingles. Almost a painful feeling; the coldness had numbed me just that quick. I showered and thawed at the same time.” It was enough excitement, Stroman concluded. He swore he wasn’t going to leave that cell for the rest of the day if he could help it: “No more movement for me unless I’m called out to get my death warrant or a visit arrives.”

  The New American

  “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the armed forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”

  In November 2010, not long before Stroman received his date, Rais—wearing a purple shirt and black trousers—spoke those words in a ceremony that made him an American. From filling out his N-400 through uttering that oath, he felt the process remolding him. Now thirty-seven, he was offering himself up to his adopted country. “It’s not only a status change,” he said. “It’s also made me more responsible, and I took it in this way. It’s not just a certificate they gave me today. It’s something that I have to treat myself in a different way. From now onward, I’m more responsible, and I have more duties.” Had he been a native-born American with a special occasion to celebrate, he might “just go and party around and throw some Champagne bottle,” as he put it. (He had clearly been watching American sports.) But for Rais it was less a celebration than a coming into his own. From the moment of his arrival, he had known that it was a country of boundless anythings, but he had also come to know its ailments. Citizenship brought the opportunity to talk of such things without fear, to try to improve the home he had chosen: the people he wanted to address were now, legally speaking, his people, and they couldn’t just kick him out if they didn’t appreciate his message. “Now I think that I have a voice,” he said.

  RAIS’S FOCUS THAT day was, as it should have been, on himself. He was part of something larger, of course: part of the vast infusion of new blood that kept the country young and churning, and that defined its essential being. This was America’s strange, stirring commitment: to keep itself vital by allowing itself, again and again, to become somebody else’s. Immigration had made, and continued to make, America; immigration ever seemed poised to tear America apart. The people were asked to celebrate this recurring passage into new hands. But in hard times those who had only the glory of their pasts could choose to cling to them—even if it meant sending the country to hell. Yet if you survived their wrath and remained, you would become as much a part of the scenery as they. You would become old blood, too. And, as sure as dawn, you would calcify into what needed further refreshment. Thus the country, having become yours, would become somebody else’s.

  It was becoming Rais’s country now. Dallas had been good to him, mostly. To the outside eye, especially the northern eye, it could be dismissed as a gussied-up, diverse, but ultimately narrow backwater. If you had failed somehow to be white, you could feel the eyes on you when you walked into a nicer restaurant. You knew that you were welcome, legally and otherwise, but you also had the feeling of being done a favor, the sense that you moved about the city at other people’s pleasure.

  To see Dallas in this way, however, was to bring to it a view that many of its own immigrants, including Rais, didn’t share. Enormous numbers of them genuinely loved it, and they continued to arrive by the planeload. They loved, for starters, the sky and the roads and the low taxes that had brought Rais to the city long ago. But it was more than that. A newcomer like Rais could find in Dallas a kind of acceptance that New York or Washington or Los Angeles didn’t give.

  There was an ad running these days in Rais’s former home that captured the difference: “NYC: Tolerant of your beliefs, judgmental of your shoes.” Dallas was, you could say, judgmental of your beliefs, tolerant of your shoes. This contrary equation wasn’t without its advantages. For the immigrant who was not coming for a cultural transplant or new belief system, who just wanted a chance to rise without meddling or to arbitrage the price of her labor, it was perfect. A city tolerant of your shoes was a city easy to understand, master, and ascend. It was a city without elusive codes. You didn’t have to wonder how to dress in public, for almost any semirespectable way of dressing would put you above average; or what knife to use with which course, because that wasn’t really how they ate down here; or what subway carried you where, since most people had their own bubble of a car. What many immigrants found in Dallas was a dimension of America’s tolerance that was the tolerance of casualness and convenience more than of open-mindedness: an ease of living that became its own kind of welcome.

  Dallas, like its immigrants, was don’t-look-back new. Its landscape seemed to have no legacy that needed reconciling with modernity. It looked like the sum of millions of private pursuits of happiness: as though everyone had conjured a dream, grabbed as much of it as possible, and not conferred with anyone else. In its absence of nostalgia, in its solipsism, the city could resonate with a certain kind of immigrant. The folk memory that Texans often called up to explain their culture was of pre-political solitude—being alone out on the land all those years ago, days from anyone who could save you, far from the law, under brutal heat, on angry soil that required taming or would fold you into its layers as it had assimilated many others before. It was a strange memory to apply to modern life, as the rest of the country was regularly reminded during national arguments. But it was a narrative that overlapped with how some newcomers, from settings far afield, saw their lives.

  For the immigrant, even listening to the radio in Dallas was to hear, on station after country station, cowboy-accented reminders of the values that you had sworn not to desert when you left the old country: to stay simple no matter how fortune blessed you; never to forget your God; to distrust the temptations of the corrupting metropolis; to live for family; to grow better than you used to be.

  MANY YEARS BEFORE Stroman received his death warrant, a university professor and anti-death-penalty activist named Rick Halperin received a letter from Polunsky. Halperin was a gregarious teddy bear of a Texan who taught peace studies at Southern Methodist University. He was well known for his work against capital punishment and had a reputation among Death Row inmates as a guy on the outside who would help them. When he saw the envelope, he recognized the sender’s name at once: Mark Stroman. He had followed Stroman’s trial. Now Stroman was writing to ask for Halperin’s help in researching end-of-life arrangements, should it come to that—basically, calling around to some undertakers in Dallas to compare prices. Stroman also made sure in the letter to voice sincere remorse for his crimes. Halperin gladly followed up, sending back a letter with options. As was not uncommon, he didn’t hear from the inmate again.

  Late in 2010, when Stroman’s expected execution date popped up on his calendar, which was the kind of thing that popped up on Rick Halperin’s calendar, the professor had an idea. The execution was to be in July of the following year. Coming a
s it would so close to the tenth anniversary of 9/11, the execution was a suitable moment to raise larger questions about America’s decade-long struggle with terror. Like many activist academics, Halperin was the kind of guy who spared no opportunity to organize a modestly attended panel discussion. Plans for one, on the execution day itself, began to take shape.

  Despite his personal geniality and good cheer, Halperin’s office overflowed with just about the most depressing books in the world, about prisons and justice and death, death, death. Books served as the furniture, the artwork, and, when stacked knee-high on the floor, the slalom poles one had to navigate to get around to the professor’s desk. Post-it notes obstructed the view of other Post-it notes. No decent liberal cause lacked for space on the walls, which featured exhortations against torture, a Code Pink sticker, a “Caution: Children at War” poster, signs in support of gay rights and the war on poverty and maternal health care, and signs in opposition to the “racist” mascot of the Cleveland Indians baseball team, the killing in Darfur, and hatred in general.

  Halperin was among those Americans who felt his country had gone off the rails after 9/11: “We had to hurt somebody after 9/11, and by God we’re still doing it.” In fairness to his country, he had always found it a little off the rails, but he genuinely believed that America had strayed from its nature and forgotten things essential to its being in fighting this vague new enemy called “terror.” He thought that Mark Stroman somehow captured the country’s turning.

  “He encapsulated everything about 9/11,” Halperin said. “He acted because of 9/11. He lashed out with violence to kill others in the name of his dead half-sister. Watching the Twin Towers collapse brought out a visceral reaction in Mark Stroman—who had no history of killing anybody, of shooting anybody before that—to kill Arabs at the point of a gun. It was the visceral, typical Texas/American response. And what was America’s response? To go invade. To go against the evidence. We ignored the evidence that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We ignored the truth and went hell-bent into Iraq to cause upheaval and violence. Well, Stroman had no evidence that the people he attacked were Middle Eastern. He looked at them and thought they were the guilty ones. But he was wrong, and America was wrong.”