The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  Perhaps ten people attended; few knew of Rais, though some vaguely remembered the shootings some years earlier. Rais spoke for forty-five minutes or so, explaining why he wanted to save Stroman’s life. Halperin remembered stunned silence, followed by a volley of questions for Rais. Then nearly every attendee signed up, giving their names and contact details, to contribute however they could. Some days later, Halperin invited Rais to give another presentation, this time to the Dallas chapter of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, which met on the third Wednesday of every month. Once again, most of the fifteen or so audience members signed up to help.

  Now a campaign had to be designed. This was Halperin’s specialty. His proposed approach was to tap into the power of Rais’s story. It was a long shot, but perhaps Stroman could win clemency from the state if the authorities heard this message of the victim who wanted to save him.

  The professor sat Rais down for a long talk about what would happen if he pursued this course: “I told him that this was going to be a grueling, demanding process for him, both physically and mentally. And that people would come at him, and he would feel like a piece of Turkish taffy being pulled in all directions by people with knowledge and without knowledge, with criticism and with support, who did or didn’t understand.” Halperin wanted Rais to know “that he was going to be questioned for his motives.”

  There was the further complication of the other two families. Rais was the lucky one who had survived Stroman’s wrath. Waqar Hasan and Vasudev Patel hadn’t been so fortunate. What basis did Rais have to call for mercy for a killing spree that spared him, in a murder case that technically didn’t involve him?

  Even before coming to Professor Halperin, Rais had thought about this. He decided to approach each of the families and seek their blessing for his campaign. He claimed that Alka Patel, the widow of Vasudev, had given a tacit endorsement of his effort, although she never publicly affirmed or contradicted his statement and has consistently refused to speak about the matter to outsiders. Still, long after the campaign, Rais and Alka remained friends: he often stopped by on a weekend to greet and check in on her. The Hasan family, publicly represented by Nadeem, Waqar’s brother-in-law, was more explicit in its support. Nadeem said his sister had been persuaded by Rais’s argument that Stroman “might convince other people in jail who would get out eventually not to be racist and to kill or hurt people based on religion or the color of their skin.” He also thought that the campaign would depict Islam well: “People always quote the ‘eye for an eye’ line in the Koran, but the next line, the line right after, is that ‘He is closer to Me who forgives.’ ” Nadeem liked the idea of exposing Americans to that further idea.

  Halperin and Jawad, who had become Rais’s wingmen and principal advisers, now focused on a media campaign. Halperin had contacts at the Dallas Morning News, and he fixed a meeting with its editorial board for May 16. Jawad knew a reporter there named Dianne Solis, who agreed to attend. Rais, Halperin, and Jawad walked up the stairs and under the building’s massive stone inscription: “Build the news upon the rock of truth and righteousness. Conduct it always upon the lines of fairness and integrity. Acknowledge the right of the people to get from the newspaper both sides of every important question.” Several of the editorial board members came to the meeting, along with a photographer. Halperin introduced Rais, who once again shared his story, which was getting more polished through repetition. Then the board rained questions on Rais: What did he hope to accomplish? How did he feel as the execution date approached? Where did he envision this campaign heading? Why was it worth saving Stroman’s life?

  “We hung on every word that Rais had to say,” said Keven Ann Willey, the editorial page editor. People often dashed back to their desks after the meeting, but this time Willey remembered her colleagues lingering. “We were so struck by the emotion of it and the magnitude of the capacity for forgiveness, we wanted clearly to write on it,” she said. “We talked about, we have to write about this in a way that will communicate with our readers. We talked about how not to sound like glassy-eyed idealists and how to translate the capacity for forgiveness into an essay that will resonate with our readership.”

  The editorial page’s opposition to the death penalty was well known in a city where many readers vehemently supported it. The board’s challenge on the issue had always been to find new ways into a debate in which the sides were pretty well fixed. Rais struck Willey as just the thing: “I do remember hoping that, because here was a victim who gets it, this editorial might touch some people who hadn’t been previously touched by this argument.”

  Rodger Jones, another board member, found Rais “doe-eyed,” earnest, and sincere. “This is a nation built through the hard work and the contributions of immigrants,” he said, “and a person like Rais is the kind of person you want to continue to build the nation on.”

  The next morning, the Morning News ran its first article on Rais’s quest, under the headline “Victim Seeks Stay for Gunman.” Ms. Solis wrote: “Bhuiyan wants to forgive. He’ll be asking for a stay of the July 20 evening scheduled execution of Stroman, and a stop to the ‘cycle of violence,’ as he calls it.” It was an apt time to call for such a stop: that month an era seemed to be passing with the death of Osama bin Laden.

  Days later, the newspaper published an opinion piece by Rais titled “Why My Attacker Should Be Spared the Death Penalty.” “There are three reasons I feel this way,” Rais wrote. “The first is because of what I learned from my parents. They raised me with the religious principle that he is best who can forgive easily. The second is because of what I believe as a Muslim, that human lives are precious and that no one has the right to take another’s life. In my faith, forgiveness is the best policy, and Islam doesn’t allow for hate and killing. And, finally, I seek solace for the wives and children of Hasan and Patel, who are also victims in this tragedy. Executing Stroman is not what they want, either. They have already suffered so much; it will cause only more suffering if he is executed.”

  A few days later the board published its impassioned editorial: “With his attacker set to die in Huntsville this summer, Bhuiyan has begun a quiet campaign to spare the man’s life. We wish to give that campaign voice. It delivers a potent message to a nation still torn by the loss of 9/11. It resists the cycle of revenge that doesn’t stop until someone has the courage to say enough.” It continued, “Despite the ugliness that festers in this country, Bhuiyan’s belief in America has not withered.” The editorial praised Rais’s “thoroughly American optimism” and argued that the “nation should embrace it regardless of the country and religious faith it comes from.”

  It was a brazen attack on received opinion in a state where faith in the Death is almost a civil religion: a half-blind immigrant citing the values of Islam in his plea that Texas not execute the white racist who sought to kill him.

  Halperin made sure the Morning News coverage crossed the desk of an Amnesty colleague in New York who had good contacts in newsrooms across the country. That led to Rais’s going on National Public Radio to plead his case, which ignited the story. Rais asked the professor if he would handle the incoming interview requests, which started arriving from all sides. “My phone didn’t stop ringing for several weeks,” Halperin said. As May became June and the execution date—July 20—drew closer, news of Rais’s gambit was spreading.

  Rais was working full-time as a database administrator for an online travel company. Until the campaign’s launch, he had been exercising most days, at the gym or with games of tennis or soccer. Now the exercise abruptly stopped. On many nights, Rais struggled to find sleep. But he also found this new struggle quite exhilarating. The mission seemed to make his hardships feel more worthwhile than before: “I didn’t come to this country just to live hand to mouth, or just to live in this country, or for money. I had a glorious past back home, but I came here to do something better.” There was some vindication of his struggles and leavings in this swirl of activi
ty.

  When one of Rais’s interviewers contacted Stroman’s attorney seeking his reaction to the campaign, Stroman reportedly said, “This is the first act of kindness that I’ve ever known.” He was stunned by Rais’s act, which he said left him more content than he had ever felt before.

  “There is a man out there that has every right to hate me for what I did after the 9/11/01 events that rocked our world,” Stroman wrote on his blog. “This man, Rais, has come to the forefront in an effort to show the world how forgiveness and compassion overrule the human nature of hate. I’m envious of his actions and his kindness speaks volumes. He is an example that the human race should follow. Rais, I’m deeply touched by all you have said and that’s from my heart and soul.”

  On another occasion, Stroman wrote of Rais, “Fate has joined us together in a very strange way.” He told Ziv that he wanted Rais to continue battling hatred and prejudice even if he couldn’t be there to help. “We need to make sure,” Mark Stroman said, “there is not another Mark Stroman.”

  “SAVING ONE LIFE is like saving the entire mankind,” Rais wrote, borrowing from the fifth surah of the Koran, in a June 2 letter to Craig Watkins. Watkins was Dallas’s dynamic young district attorney. A few weeks after their Morning News triumph, Team Rais had managed to land a meeting with him. He was the first African American to hold the job and a breaker of molds. Though a supporter of the Death, he’d become known for his pursuit of exonerations for the wrongfully convicted. In many cases, he had prevailed. The team felt good about their chances with him. They would ask him to withdraw Stroman’s death warrant. By now they were armed with new reasoning: in addition to the forgiveness argument, they had found a provision in Texas law that gave violent-crime victims a right to mediation with their attackers. The idea was to sit face-to-face, victim and attacker, and discuss the crime from both points of view, in the hope of helping the victim process the event and move on psychologically. Rais wanted to engage in mediation, which required months to prepare and carry out. The death sentence, if not commuted to life on compassionate grounds, should at least be delayed to accommodate Rais’s emotional healing, the team planned to argue.

  Rais, Professor Halperin, and Nadeem went to the meeting together. They were waiting in the anteroom when one of Watkins’s aides emerged and invited them in. Rais and Nadeem entered the room, and the aide then blocked Halperin from following them. “Not you,” he said. Watkins knew all about Rick Halperin, and they had sparred a few times.

  Having invited Rais and Hadeem in, Watkins heard them out. Nadeem found him sympathetic and attentive, but the DA confessed that there was little he could do. Let me get back to you, he said. Rais pleaded for a decision by week’s end, so that, if it came back negative, he could try the parole board next.

  It took two whole weeks, with time dwindling, to get their answer—and the answer, as it so often was down here, was no.

  IT WAS TIME to take this campaign on the road: this was Team Rais’s conclusion. And, oddly enough, those roads were in Europe.

  Stroman had carried on with his pen pals all this while, slowly weaving his own little global network. One correspondent was a British woman in her mideighties named Margaret Meakins. Some years earlier, widowed and depressed, recently placed in an old-age home, Meakins seemed to her daughter to be losing her desire to live. The daughter tried several things and eventually alighted on the idea of her mother’s writing to a Death Row inmate over in America. She became, as Michael had, one of the fair number of Europeans, aghast at American capital punishment, who correspond with Death Row prisoners—rather like all those nice people in Kansas City and St. Paul who occupy themselves with the finer details of girls’ schooling in Afghanistan and abstinence campaigns in Botswana. The Meakinses reported that letters had been arriving from Mark for the last seven years, often twice a week—newsy, funny, sweetly teasing. The daughter claimed that the letters had helped her mum to vanquish depression and, eventually, to return to the family home.

  As the daughter, Linda, followed Stroman’s march toward execution, she wondered how she might repay her debt. She contacted a British charity called Reprieve, led by Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer who had made his name through twenty-five years of work defending the indigent and mentally unbalanced in American death-penalty cases. He had also represented several inmates at the U.S. facility in Guantánamo Bay, where, incidentally, he was once accused by the authorities—incorrectly, he insists—of smuggling Speedo swimsuits and Under Armour briefs to his clients.

  Ordinarily, Stafford Smith would have turned the Meakinses down. Reprieve was tiny and barely able to manage the cases it already had. It took hundreds of hours of reading, interviewing, brief-writing, and litigating to help a prisoner who probably didn’t have much of a shot. Two years earlier, however, Reprieve had taken on a project, funded by the European Union, to locate and assist foreign nationals facing the death penalty in the United States. And there was, believe it or not, a case to be made that Stroman was more than just a true American.

  It was a precarious case, but Reprieve came across adequate suggestion—“evidence” may be too strong a term—that Mark’s father, Eddie Stroman, had in actual fact been Eddie Ströman. The umlaut, that pair of dots that non-Germans struggle to fathom, now carried the potential to save Mark. Eddie Ströman, if that is his real name, was said to have come from Lower Saxony—how distantly, it wasn’t known. Reprieve reached out to the German consulate in Houston, seeking to have Mark deemed a German national. But Stafford Smith didn’t wait for that decision. He had somehow managed to convince himself that Mark Ströman, as Mark’s legal filings would now spell it, qualified as a European stranded on America’s cruel Death Row. Armed with government financing from the EU, Reprieve jumped aboard the spreading effort to save his life. A case that started with a militant American seeking to exterminate foreigners had somehow flipped: it was now framed as a case about a European prisoner hurtling toward death despite his model American victim’s campaign to spare him.

  Reprieve volunteered to bolster the legal work of Stroman’s attorney, Lydia Brandt, which she found welcome. She had been pursuing appeals on the more conventional grounds, but Reprieve shared Professor Halperin’s assessment that Rais’s story was perhaps the sharpest, most attention-getting spear for their cause. So its people contacted Halperin and offered him and Rais an all-expenses-paid, four-country tour of Europe, where they would raise awareness of Stroman’s Strömanness and lobby ideologically sympathetic governments (the death penalty is banned across the European Union) to call on Texas to spare this European prisoner.

  Because Rais needed a week’s vacation, the trip compelled him to do what he had thus far avoided: let his boss at the travel company know about his new moonlight life as an activist. “He was shocked to hear that I was a survivor of a hate crime of 9/11 and was shot in the face,” Rais said. “He was more shocked and surprised when I told him about the campaign.” Vacation granted.

  So, on July 4, the pre-umlaut Stroman’s favorite holiday, Rais found himself in Copenhagen, in a meeting room at the headquarters of the Danish pharmaceutical company Lundbeck. Three days earlier, the company had made a headline-grabbing announcement: it would stop shipping its drug Nembutal to American prisons that conducted execution by lethal injection. Nembutal was intended to control seizures in patients, but some American executioners had turned to it earlier that year, when a company called Hospira announced that it would stop selling its sodium thiopental anesthetic, the usual drug of choice. In the meeting Rais applauded Lundbeck’s efforts and asked for support for his specific case. In a sign of the hubris that was beginning to attach to Rais’s work, he and his team suggested afterward that Rais had been responsible for the company’s announcement. “In large part, they did it because of his visit—that’s pretty phenomenal,” Halperin said. “They’d said that they wanted to make changes, and when he came I think it solidified what they wanted to do.” That Lundbeck’s statement had precede
d Rais’s visit by three days became somewhat irrelevant.

  Onward to France and the European Parliament. The next day, in Room 3.5 of the Louise Weiss Building in Strasbourg, Rais, standing alongside like-minded lawmakers on the Subcommittee on Human Rights, gave a press conference. He was hosted by Baroness Sarah Ludford, a Liberal Democrat member representing London. He urged European officials to pressure the authorities in Texas to grant Stroman clemency and again raised the drug-exports issue. Then it was onward to Germany for meetings with members of the Bundestag. Another victory: Tom Koenigs, chairman of the body’s Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid, was quoted in a local report as vowing to challenge the execution. “We’ve written letters to the governor and not gotten a response,” Koenigs said. “We’re trying to make contact with them. This is about human rights and we have a mission to promote these values.”

  With each meeting, Professor Halperin could see Rais maturing. Rais came to this work already conflicted between his very real humility and his very real sense of grandness. Selling himself like this, becoming a brand, packaging his story into juicy morsels for hungry reporters—these things widened the gap between how he conceived of himself and what he now had to be. A man who professed to be primarily interested in the next world—and continued to pray several times a day while abroad—was ever more determined to leave his mark down here, and seemed willing to sacrifice his health and tranquility to do so.

  “Not only did he not lust for Mark to be killed,” Halperin said of Rais. “He took the lead in a very emotional way, because he had to talk. Every time he speaks, he has to talk about what happened to him. He has to relive being shot in public. Every time a microphone’s before him, he has to relive that anger, that hurt, that blood. And he’s still got thirty-five pellets in his face, in his head! He had to relive his own victimization every day because he wants to get us to a better place.”