The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  The idea involved something called a private bill. It was a rarely used tool in Congress: pieces of legislation, approved by both House and Senate and signed by the president, that named a person or group and specified a change in the law that applied just to them. Among the reasons private bills were uncommon was the obvious possibility of corruption. “If you’re making a law for one person,” Congressman Holt said, “the committee has to ask—everyone should ask—‘Is this a quid pro quo for special interests or special favors? Is this blatantly unfair to the people who are not covered by the private bill?’ ”

  Undeterred by all this, on February 13, 2003, Holt introduced his private bill, HR 867, in Congress. The proposed legislation was titled: “For the relief of Durreshahwar Durreshahwar, Nida Hasan, Asna Hasan, Anum Hasan, and Iqra Hasan.” (Whatever happened with the legislation, it once again protected the Hasans from deportation for the time being, pending the bill’s fate.)

  Holt, still junior in his second term, called, wrote letters, and sent packets of clippings to his colleagues, trying to overcome the inevitable skepticism and inertia. He lobbied influential members, including Jim Sensenbrenner, a Republican from the Milwaukee suburbs and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Houston also on that committee and the ranking member on its Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security, and Claims—which had oversight over private bills of this kind.

  At last, fifteen months after introducing it, Holt got the bill through the Judiciary Committee. It took another two months to pass the House, and another four for the Senate. Finally, on October 30, 2004, as a group of U.S. Marines died in an attack by Muslim extremists in a far-off place called Fallujah, President George W. Bush signed HR 867 into law and gave five bereft Muslim immigrants a renewed chance at an American life.

  “The people of the United States and our government have an odd attitude toward immigration and immigrants,” Holt said later. “Often forgetting our own origins, and even our own best interests, we resist diversity and even lash out against others like ourselves, because we mistakenly think they are not like ourselves.”

  America, he said, “strives to give hope, fairness, and compassion. But these are not automatic. Cruel fate or happenstance often threatens to crush hope and opportunity. Irrational human passions and prejudices can thwart justice and fairness. The demands of life in a busy, complicated society and the exigencies of a complicated legal code can crowd out compassion.”

  Yet sometimes, Holt said, “we see hope coming out of tragedy, a fair result out of an insane injustice, and compassionate concern out of impersonal laws and regulations.”

  RAIS’S FORTUNES WERE also turning. Not long after returning from Bangladesh, he had gone for Friday prayers to the mosque in Richardson. It was one of those strip-mall suburbs of Dallas where far more acreage is dedicated to parking than to doing the things you parked to do. Richardson was full of immigrants, including a fair number of Muslims. Its halal restaurants offered stacks of a publication called the Muslim Yellow Pages (A to Z Printing & Promotion: “We Welcome the Islamic Community”; A Plus Automotive Repair: “Ask for Hasan”; Texas King, a meat purveyor: “Eat of the things which Allah hath provided for you, Lawfull and good”). At the Richardson mosque that evening, Rais saw a man he thought he recognized. He walked over, apologized for interrupting, and asked if he was a Bangladeshi and a graduate of the Sylhet Cadet College.

  The man was a little stunned. Well, yes, he was.

  It was an old schoolmate who now lived in Dallas and worked in technology, for Texas Instruments. He invited Rais to his home to catch up properly. When he heard Rais’s story, he felt an urge to assist him. Though Rais was happy working as a restaurant server for now, his dream remained to get into IT. His schoolmate offered to help. Come to think of it, he knew the perfect guy for Rais to meet.

  So Rais went to see Ahsan Mohammed, who was an important man in the community—a database administrator at an esteemed company, a board member of the mosque, and, in his spare time, the founder of a small IT training academy called Safa Soft. Mohammed would begin by asking students about themselves, where they had worked, what they already knew, before suggesting a course of study. In Rais’s case, he recommended that he train himself in Microsoft’s SQL Server platform. It was a database system that companies used to store data and retrieve it as customers, say, bought books online or returned shoes or renewed subscriptions. It was like Microsoft Excel on steroids, built to handle thousands of simultaneous queries. The work of administrators like Mohammed was to keep the database humming: allocating more space when needed, debugging, diagnosing blockages. Getting such work now became Rais’s next mission.

  Mohammed couldn’t recall if he charged Rais the usual $600. Rais remembers getting the course for free, and Mohammed’s giving him free textbooks as well. The teacher was taken with the seriousness of his student, the intensity of his monocular focus, the tragedy that he stoically bore. Rais completed the course, while working at the Olive Garden on weekends, and continued to pop in to Safa Soft from time to time after finishing to greet his teacher. One of the things that distressed Rais about America was how little respect teachers received: “Back home, if the teacher comes across, we stand up. We do the same thing here, but in the court. Because the judge is there to punish us or to give us freedom, we have to respect. How come we can’t do the same thing for the teachers—those who make us a human being?”

  Around this time, in the middle of 2003, Rais caught another break. After his long battle with debt, he won a $50,000 grant from the Texas Crime Victims’ Compensation Program. Dr. Spencer’s office had helped him apply. It was a boon, and yet it still fell $10,000 short of his bills. He contacted the program to ask for a little more but was turned down. They said something about it having to be a “catastrophic disaster” to go up to the $100,000 tier.

  If the grant wouldn’t grow, the bills would have to shrink. Rais enlisted the state program in his cause, faxing them bills and asking them to lobby his creditors for discounts. He reached out to those creditors directly, too, and tried to cut deals.

  “I had to go back and forth, negotiating with all the creditors—the hospital, the ambulance service,” Rais said. “Going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, for several weeks. Finally, Dr. Spencer gave me a break; hospital gave me a little break. Finally, the medical bill came down to $42,000. So now the victims fund, they were asking me to give them back the $8,000. And I was saying that, ‘It’s not $8 million; it’s not $800,000. It’s just $8,000, which is not even your monthly salary.’ ” How could this rich country be so stingy? “I was just shocked,” Rais said. “How could you ask that $8,000 back?”

  He wrote back pleading his case: he needed the money to help with rent, get a car, maybe see a psychologist. He had been able to get his eye treated because Dr. Spencer was kind. Many other needs remained on hold.

  The program relented and let him keep the money.

  All this while, he had been working at the Olive Garden. Toward the end of 2004, he found a job applying his SQL Server skills during the week while continuing to wait tables on weekends. Phil Amlong remembered Rais having left only one time, for a better opportunity at a Cheesecake Factory. But his protégé had returned within maybe six weeks, because they put new staff out on the patio, where in a city of air-conditioning junkies there were few tips to be had. Rais remained at the Olive Garden for more than three years, until the moment that Amlong always knew would come.

  Rais approached him one day to say that he was leaving. He was grateful to his boss for the chance he’d received, but now a new opportunity awaited. It was some job involving computers. Soon Rais was gone.

  [Please Write Back]

  Stroman still remembered the day they brought him down to the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas: “I come here with three squad cars from Dallas Sheriff. When I left Dallas County coming to Death Row, there was four officers in each car. And comi
ng down here we drove like a hundred miles an hour. They had the lights on and blocked all entrances. It was like I killed the president. When I got here that was—I don’t know—that was like a shock of the world, shock of my life, coming to Texas Death Row. And then when I seen the big emblem of the State of Texas and it said ‘Death Row,’ it made my heart jump to my stomach.”

  As he became prisoner No. 999-409, Stroman struggled with the rhythms of this long-stay hotel for the doomed. His letters and other writings offer a detailed portrait of his life inside. The days began around 3 a.m. with the ardent banging and slamming of Death Row’s steel gates and doors, and then of the food slot of each inmate’s bathroom-sized cell. Even in deep sleep, Stroman claimed to feel the metallic vibrations in his body. “Chow Time! Chow Time! Lights on if you are eating,” the guard would bark; sometimes Stroman could tell that the man on duty was really just a boy, his voice cracking into a squeal. There wasn’t much time to snap out of bed and secure your breakfast: if you didn’t flip your light on and stand at the door by the time they passed, you might get VR’d—recorded in their logbooks as a “verbal refuse.”

  If you made it in time, you could count on some permutation of these things: a stack of pancakes (which Stroman found “cold raw doughy”); “a spoonful of eggs that wouldn’t fill up a small baby”; “sour” applesauce (which he thought not even an infant could tolerate); biscuits, jelly, and butter; cereal or “watery oatmeal”; coffee (which he routinely felt was either too cold or too diluted).

  The jolt of the breakfast service often rattled and angered Stroman. He found a certain comfort afterward in his solitary morning rites—washing his “old weathered face”; brushing his teeth, sometimes with only water and sometimes, when friends mailed commissary money, with toothpaste; heating water to make his own, better coffee; crossing off one more day on a calendar that for him had no firm end date as yet. He paid special attention to which of his neighbors was next in line for the Death. Ordinarily, the guys gave each other hell. But a man nearing the end deserved sympathy and respect at recreation time.

  Sometimes Stroman would exercise—maybe eight sets of fifty push-ups, a few hundred knee-bends. Sometimes, on a radio bought at the commissary, he would listen to the lone Dallas station he could pick up down in Livingston, three and a half hours by car from home. The traffic bulletins made him especially nostalgic—hearing the names of the streets that had made him, of the expressways and satellite towns of his scattered youth.

  He would stare out the window for long stretches with the faint hope of witnessing the unusual. One day he fixated on the wild cats that roamed the Polunsky grounds. He was jealous of their fatness—proof of their being better fed than the prisoners. He also noticed that the rats near Visitation were unfairly corpulent. In the letters he wrote and journals he kept, he recorded the quotidian miseries of the Row, the little brutalities that evoked the great brutality to come. Like his sighting of one of the wild cats, around 10 p.m. on a Saturday, caught in the razor wire above the fencing that enclosed the sidewalk leading to Visitation. He seemed, when he later wrote of the incident, to identify with that cat, “yelping in pain, blood dripping from its wound and as we walk by not one word was said.”

  When money was working in his favor, Stroman could shop at the commissary, which sold stamps and typewriters, radios and toothpaste, and all manner of food. Once a week, the inmates could fill out slips, which one of the guards would pick up, later bringing around their purchases on a cart. One of the crucial items the commissary stocked was petroleum jelly—crucial if you didn’t want to wake up wet in the middle of the night, first thinking you’d dreamed yourself into peeing, before realizing it was rain transpiring from the free world. Stroman learned to take a fistful of jelly and smear it into the slender cracks on the walls and ceiling.

  Polunsky also turned Stroman into an exacting, concerned, vigilant eater. A good deal of his writing dwelled on food. Food was the way the free world came into life on the Row, and it was a reliable barometer of political conditions in the building: when the prisoners misbehaved and the unit went into lockdown mode, there was a likelihood of crudely smashed-together sandwiches (noodle/tuna/mustard, or cheese, or peanut butter); when important holidays came, barring some recreation-hour melee, things could get fleetingly awesome. It was not unheard of on such occasions to get through your slot a full apple and full orange with breakfast, or, later in the day, chicken-fried steak with mashed taters awash in gravy, or a pork chop and brisket with pie and cake, or some fresh bread or red beans or mixed veggies. Sometimes it wasn’t obvious why such a meal had arrived—it wasn’t Christmas, wasn’t Thanksgiving, wasn’t the Fourth of July. On those days you had to figure, as you delved into the deliciousness, that one of your buddies was about to get the poison, and that you were benefiting from the flurry of visitors and the need of the guards to maintain appearances of tending prisoners well.

  The telltale sign of a special-reasons meal was silence, when men who otherwise couldn’t stop talking dwelled silently and wholly on their plates.

  On most days, assuming the unit wasn’t on lockdown and an individual prisoner wasn’t in solitary, the men had an hour or two for recreation. “Our outside recreation is a cage surrounded by four very high concrete walls with bars and screen on top,” Stroman wrote. “Its like a cage at a zoo, all we can see is the sky. For example, it’s the size of a garage and you would be able to park two cars inside this area.” In theory, it was a relief to get out of a tiny cell and out of your own head and into the company of others. But Stroman, whom no one ever called an introvert, found himself less and less drawn to others: “I’ve noticed I’ve pulled back from this little society I live in.”

  Out in the free world, Stroman had always been at the lower end of whatever ranking one wanted to go by—money, education, occupation. Many of his ideas seemed to develop as a means of emphasizing what lay beneath him: ungrateful immigrants, breeding drug addicts, minorities making it where he hadn’t because they convinced the government to shaft guys like him and give them the spoils. Out there, feeling superior to those around him was a constant—and perhaps exhausting—effort, whose reward was maintaining some of what a more honest man might have called self-esteem.

  Here at Polunsky, it was different. For the first time in a long time, Stroman could feel himself to be one of the more respectable and less screwed-up people around him: “There’s some sickos in this place and tons of child molesters. Makes my stomach flip. I’m no angel by far, but I do have respect for women, children and our elderly.” In here, as in few other places, he didn’t need to invent much to be able to imagine himself as someone’s better. He could engage in a commonplace, and somewhat tenuous, prison sanctimony: the prisoner who was at least not one of those prisoners.

  The hierarchies of Death Row were as intricate as those of a bee colony. The starkest line, in Stroman’s eyes, was between ordinary murderers like him and the rapists and killers of the most vulnerable, whom he didn’t even deign to speak with or refer to as “men” in his writings: “the grandma killers and baby rapist pedophiles who are down in the hole because they can’t keep their private parts out of their hands and tend to show all the female guards every chance they get, so those sicko’s are excluded from my talks and from the word ‘men.’ ” Nor did he admire those who raped grown women. Turning women into widows was, apparently, not in the same league of cruelty in his mind.

  There were other lines, too—for example, between the guys who could afford stuff at the commissary and the guys who couldn’t. Or between the guys who had backers out there in the free world, fighting their case or posting their letters on a blog, and the guys whose sphere of influence went no further than the unit. There were lines dividing the guys whose women stayed with them, the guys who had no women, and, most improbably, the guys who had managed to get with new women while incarcerated, through visits and letters. There were lines between the black guys, the Anglos, and the “Spanish” guys
. A line between those who got visitors and those who didn’t. A line between the guys in solitary and the guys in regular. There were subtler divides that Stroman perceived, too, like the one between the inmates who maintained the energy to complain about spoiled beans and such and the ones who were already apprenticing for the passivity of death. Stroman called the latter “death waiters who have just gave up and don’t care what is tossed in their cages.”

  It was the crazies, though, who most haunted Stroman. It offended his sense of honor to be lumped together with them, and yet they, in the fullness of their craziness, rendered forgettable the mere wildness he had struggled with all his life. Here were real-life people who lent him the dignity-by-comparison he had always sought from others, especially the dark and foreign. He really could feel himself to be superior to the one guy, convicted of sex offenses, who insisted that his cell was being gassed and that the CIA had planted a tracking device within him. He felt superior to the guy who he claimed “pulled out their eye and ate it.” As Stroman wrote, “This is NOT normal behavior at all.” He felt better, too, than the guy who stashed three squirt bottles of his own shit and launched a fecal fusillade against three guards, who left “chocking and gagin’ as they ran.” Or the guy a few cells down from him, who barked like a dog: “His mind is vanishing fast and he gets no help from the medical staff. They all just laugh and shake their heads as they walk away from his cell. They do not care if one has mental issues and are in complete denial that these isolation cells are having any effects on people going insane.” Or the bearded guy who would sit on the cell floor, enclosed by a bedsheet, with “that glazed over look of someone who is not home,” as Stroman put it. “He would sit there all day and mumble to himself and would hold conversations with some invisible force. The guards would even ask me about him. That’s all this dude did … mumble and sit on the floor medicated to the max.”