The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  “Mr. Rais, thank you for your inspiring message. You have forgiven me; you have forgiven the unforgivable,” Stroman said in a video message. He added, “What do I want you to carry on? What I want you to do today, I want you to get out there, take center stage, and give the world their rights. It’s a remarkable thing you’re doing. And just continue with the human rights, because you are touching so many people.”

  Despite what loomed, Stroman’s mood was upbeat. Sometimes he fixed himself one of his signature “Death Row lattes,” using a pint of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream, three heaping spoons of coffee, and some sweetener. Sometimes he just listened to the radio as he tried to gather his thoughts, which could feel like wild eagles streaking the sky.

  Stroman was overwhelmed by how much was being done for him. “I’ve seen so many people worldwide trying to save my life in the last few days and weeks and it’s a surreal feeling,” he wrote. The pen pals, the lawyers from Reprieve, Rais Bhuiyan, and, even more unbelievably, organizations representing the Muslim community in Dallas—Stroman felt blessed to have all these people wanting him to live. It was more than his own family was doing for him.

  Sometimes the guys on the Row made snide comments about Mark’s public declarations of regret. “They’re calling me a pussy, but I look at them like primitive apes,” he told Ziv.

  “The closer I get to my death,” Mark wrote, “Peace I seem to find.” Even as he encouraged those seeking to save him, he was preparing himself for the end: “In the final hours when they do come, I’ll blow out the candle of life with no bitterness for I have tasted life, lived, loved.”

  WITH THE DEATH, the legal drama is often saved for the end.

  On July 13, Rais had filed his suit against Perry in state court in Austin. He later stood on the courthouse steps, under sweltering heat, giving a press briefing and taking questions. He returned to Dallas. The case was set for a hearing on Monday, July 18, just two days before Stroman’s possible last.

  An hour or so before that hearing, Rais’s side received word that the matter had been transferred to federal court, at the suggestion of the Texas attorney general. The reasoning was that Rais had claimed a violation of his civil rights, which was more properly examined by a federal judge.

  Rais’s team rushed back to the law firm to write fresh documents, and his lawyer, Khurrum Wahid, sprinted several blocks to the federal courthouse, getting there just before closing time at 5 p.m. He filed the documents required to request an injunction against the execution, and they were told to check in on Tuesday. And then on Tuesday Wahid was informed that the case would at last be heard by a judge—but now only on Wednesday, the day Stroman was supposed to die.

  That morning, Rais woke up thirteen hours before the scheduled end of Stroman’s life at 6 p.m. He dressed for the day and gave some interviews, including to a Japanese media outlet: another hopeful sign of how far the story was traveling. At 9:30, Team Rais gathered in the hotel lobby, from which they headed to the federal courthouse.

  At 10 a.m., in an ornate courtroom decorated with paintings of jurists past, Judge Lee Yeakel heard arguments from both sides for a quarter hour. He promised a result by afternoon. Rais and Wahid returned to the law offices to wait. Then, in the early afternoon, word came from the court that the judge had turned Rais down. They had one remaining avenue in state court—but this time civil, not criminal. The lawyers now had to produce yet another crop of motions: an appeal of Judge Yeakel’s order to a federal appellate court, a draft appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court should the appeals court decline, and their renewed bid to the state court to delay the execution.

  The lawyers’ scrambling that afternoon reminded Rais of “a perfect Law and Order episode.” There was some hope for their new bid at the state level, but anxiety dripped from every face in the office. The dozen or so of them sat in a large conference room, around a long oval table: Rais, his lawyers, some interns, a handful of reporters who’d asked to trail them. Rais observed the interns “typing 100 miles per hour”; people getting up and leaving the room and returning every few seconds to print or fax or receive some document or other; cell phones ringing nonstop with calls from colleagues and news reporters; one of the journalists snapping pictures.

  Rais, normally unflappable, was tense. “It was too much pressure on my shoulder,” he said. “My heart became very heavy. And I said, ‘Well, God,’—the way that I was praying on 21st September—I was praying that, ‘Right now, there’s another guy, another human being like me, he’s in the same situation. He is thinking is he going to die or is he going to survive today, and I can understand what he’s going through in his mind. And at least have mercy on this guy, and at least let him live for a better world. Let him live to make a change.’ ”

  As the team frantically worked, a message bearing luck arrived from the court. A judge in the state civil court—one Joseph Hart—had, at long last, become the first one willing to hear the case on its merits. He would see them at 5 p.m.

  “DON’T CRY. DON’T cry, baby,” Erica remembered him saying. Stroman was soothing his daughter Erica and even managing a few laughs on the other end of the phone. He was in good spirits for a last day. “He said, ‘I’m going to be in a better place,’ ” Erica recalled. “And he was like, ‘I know what my sins are,’ and he was telling me, ‘I’m fine. I’m OK.’ ” He was even a little excited, having been treated to his first Coke and first cigarettes in an eternity. He apologized for coughing like a virgin from the smoke, which may have had something to do with cramming three cigarettes into fifteen minutes.

  Erica, Amber, and Tena were sorry they couldn’t make it to Huntsville, life being what it was and all. But at least they each got a few minutes with him on the phone. When Amber got a turn, she got right down to it: “Dad, I’m not CNN news; I’m not your publicity crew. I want to know where you’re at in your spiritual life. Because I worry about that, and I stress on that. I mean, after you’re gone, where are you going?” Not that she was exactly where she wanted to be in her spiritual life, but she at least had time. She remembered her father, who had said little about God to her when he lived on the outside, sounding now like a true believer:

  “He said, ‘I know where I’m going. I made peace with God. I asked for forgiveness.’ I was worried about him going to hell—you know, because ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ He felt in his heart that he was going to heaven, no matter whatever he done. He knew what he done was wrong, but he had built a relationship with God.”

  He also kept repeating that he was “at peace” with everything, which started to irritate Amber: “I just wanted to say, ‘Are you serious? You’re at peace with this?’ But I didn’t. I told him, ‘That’s good, Dad.’ ”

  When Erica spoke to him, she could barely contain herself. When he was gone, who would call her freckles kisses from the sun? “Don’t cry, baby girl,” she remembered him saying. “Let tears of joy flow down.” She remembered his parting advice: “I’ll always be the same fucking knucklehead that I’ve always been. But if you don’t know God, let Him into your life.”

  He said something else to both daughters that stayed with them: “This saved my life.” It was the same thought that he’d shared with Ilan Ziv, but his family more easily understood it. Out there, their father had lived impulse to impulse, sense to sense. He hadn’t possessed the idea of God, of being fallen, of a higher and lower way of being. He had existed sucking from life the marrow of beers and girls and powders, then calling it a night, waking up, and sucking some more. On the Row something had clicked and had given him the chance, as he saw it, to reserve a table in heaven. “It took him this to realize how to really live,” Erica said. “I do agree it saved his life.”

  Amber, who, though a Christian, also spoke often of karma, agreed: “I think everything happens for a reason. Because if my dad would’ve stayed out on the streets, if he wouldn’t have done this—and I’m not saying that what he done was right; it’s far from right—but I believe in my heart that if
my dad would’ve stayed out in the street, he would have either been killed or … And at that time in his life, he wasn’t saved. He didn’t pick up the Bible. I know he woulda went to hell.”

  Tena, who spoke to Stroman as well that day, concurred: “It sucks that those families had to be the price to pay for his eternity, but I believe it took this happening for God to get him where He needed him. Otherwise, I don’t think Mark would have stayed still long enough for God to give—because God’s a gentleman. He ain’t gonna force Himself on nobody. He’s a gentleman. He’s there for us if we need Him, but He ain’t gonna force Himself on us.”

  Tena had talked to Mark about Rais’s campaign. Mark, she said, was flabbergasted: “This man’s going everywhere, all over the world, trying for my life, and I tried to take his from him,” she remembered Mark telling her. He said he didn’t know there was that kind of forgiveness and love in the world.

  Stroman had the chance that afternoon to speak to his only grandchild for the first time. Amber put her daughter on the phone, and she cooed, “I love you, Grandpa Mark.” Everyone on their end was bawling. “You know what I said?” Tena recalled. “I said, ‘The State of Texas thought they was trying to take Mark Stroman off this earth and out of this world,’ but I said, ‘They forgot he had three kids and a grandbaby that look just like him.’ ”

  There was still a chance of deliverance that afternoon. In case it all failed, Stroman promised to his kin that he’d run up to their dead relatives in heaven and give them a kiss. Tena, who so long ago struggled to hold him down, remembered him telling her that their joint legacy was in her care now: “He said his destiny was to meet me, me have his kids—that was his destiny. That now it’s up to me to keep. Each one of our kids is like a link on a chain. Every time we’d have one of the kids, we’d add a link to that chain, and he said that that was his destiny, to meet me and have kids. And he said, ‘Tena, when the chain breaks and a link falls off, people don’t pick up the link and put it in their pocket to get the chain fixed. More likely, it’s gone. That chain’s wrecked.’ He said, ‘Tena, keep our chain together. You be the missing link and keep our chain together.’ ”

  ILAN ZIV, WHO in the course of seven years had gone from chronicler to friend to designated spreader of Stroman’s remains, was in Huntsville to witness the death that he still hoped would be averted. He was joined by a small handful of Stroman’s chosen visitors, including a former priest from Britain and a Texan named Laura, who had become interested in the case more recently. In the midafternoon, Ziv and the others made their way to the Execution Suite, a large house run by a local church where friends and family of the waiting-dead could wait themselves in the final hours (and even stay overnight, if necessary). In this particular case, it was only friends and no family.

  This was how Stroman claimed to want it at the end, though perhaps it was an adjustment to the inevitable. “I don’t want no family,” he told Ziv in one of their Visitation talks. “I’m allowed visits the last week for eight hours a day, for five days a week. You know, some of my kids here in Texas were saying that they wanted to be present. I’m not gonna traumatize them. When they strap me down, we’re going to be as close as me and you are. You’re gonna be looking. I don’t want them to see that and remember that. And for the other family members who say they want to be here for me during my execution—I don’t want them here for that. If you can’t be here with me while I’m alive and breathing, don’t dare when they’re fixing to kill me. I need you now. I don’t need you when I’m fixing to leave.”

  So it was just friends in the end. Ziv and the other visitors received a hearty, home-cooked lunch from the church volunteers, including “homemade Jell-O with real fruits,” as he later reported. Then the group sat in the living room and waited. Despite their common cause, people were mostly quiet; Ziv figured they were all focused on Mark in their minds rather than one another. Stroman called them three or four times; he had between 3 and 5 p.m. for final conversations. From time to time, the hovering people whom Ziv called “functionaries of the execution machine”—pastors and prison officials assigned to the suite—offered to pray with their visitors and explain the steps between now and execution.

  Ziv knew that he and the group were being treated as well as could be, but something about the Execution Suite sickened him. Something about its saccharine, Jell-O-abetted gentility: “I loathed this place and was furious at all the wonderful people who surrounded us from nice church volunteers to at least 2 chaplains and Mark’s spiritual advisor,” he later wrote. “I know it is irrational and also unfair to be angry with people who tried to make our stay, given the circumstances, as pleasant as possible. But it was in the ‘Hospitality suite’ that I understood for the first time how this wonderful ‘cover up’ allows the State of Texas to execute so many people while still claiming to be moral and Christian. Execution, in the ‘Hospitality Suite,’ was treated as some terminal disease from which Mark was going to die in few hours. We were the assembled relatives and friends to be with him in his last moment. None of us had any power to change anything. Execution like death itself was an act of nature. We just had to accept it and all these wonderful people around us worked very hard to ease our ‘acceptance.’ ”

  Ziv was full of nerves and anger over his friend’s fate, and in his state he found himself despising the church volunteers for their kindness. He knew it wasn’t their fault. He compared the present way of killing to the executions of another era, and somehow reasoned that the old ones were more honorable in their forthrightness: “I wished the Guillotine was back in service with hooded executioners hoisting the head of the condemned, showing it to the cheering crowds. It was so ‘uncivilized’ in the French Revolution or Elizabethan England hundreds of years before, but it was a much more honest event showing execution for what it is.”

  Shortly before 5 p.m., when the group would be moved from the suite to the prison, Ziv got on the phone with Rais, who needed some help. Rais could sometimes rub Ziv the wrong way; he wasn’t sure why. It was perhaps that Rais seemed to get all the media credit for reforming Mark when it had been Ziv and his crew who invested years in him, not mere months. And it was Ziv’s suspicion that Rais was in this for something more than Stroman’s life: “I always felt that Rais could have had a shot at sainthood on this side of heaven if he had not become such a self-promoter,” Ziv said. Now here Rais was on the phone. He was calling because he’d quietly been hoping to speak to Stroman during his phone window today. It would be their first encounter since the one at the Buckner Food Mart. Rais would, inshallah, have a fuller opportunity to speak with Stroman if the case succeeded and he got his mediation sessions. But, just in case, he wanted to try now. He was calling Ziv because he had tried reaching Stroman directly at the prison but had been unable to get through. Rais suspected that the authorities were thwarting him because of his legal campaign.

  Rais was in luck. Ziv had been talking to Stroman on the Execution Suite landline, and he put his cell phone on speaker and placed it near the other phone, so the two men could have their first conversation since the one beginning with “Where are you from?” a decade earlier:

  Mark: “Rais. How you are doing, Rais?”

  Rais: “Hey, Mark. How are you, buddy?”

  Mark: “How are you doing, man? Hey, man, thank you for everything you have been trying to do for me. You are inspiring. Thank you from my heart, dude.”

  Rais: “Mark, you should know that I am praying for God, the most compassionate and gracious. I forgive you, and I do not hate you. I never hated you …”

  Mark: “You are inspired, Rais.”

  Rais: “… and this is from the bottom of my heart.”

  Mark: “You are a remarkable person. Thank you from my heart. I love you, bro. I love you with all my heart. Thank you for being such an awesome person. I mean it.”

  Rais: “You will always be there.”

  Mark: “You touched my heart. I would have never expected this.”


  Rais: “You touched mine, too.”

  Mark: “Hey, Rais, they are telling me to hang up now. I will try to call in a minute.”

  And that was it. Stroman’s phone time had ended. Now he would have to prepare for the last meal and other formalities. He had reportedly ordered chicken-fried steak with gravy; an omelet with ham, cheese, onions, and tomatoes; bacon; fried potatoes, squash, and okra; pork chops with eggs sunny-side up; Dr Pepper; and a pint of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream.

  Over in Austin, Rais’s team was again due in court. The legal papers had multiplied into the thousands of pages, which they stuffed into cardboard boxes and carried from the law firm to the courthouse. As the group made its way there, everyone roasting in a sweaty glaze, Rais kept replaying one moment of the phone call with Stroman in his mind: “Once he said that word, ‘I love you, bro,’ I could feel already my tears were coming out of my eyes. The same person, ten years back, he wanted to kill me for no reason, for my skin color, because of my Islamic faith. And now, after ten years, the same person is telling me he loves me and calling me his brother.”

  What Stroman didn’t tell Rais, but did tell Ziv, was that a certain part of him wanted Rais to fail. He was in love with all this love, this forgiveness—even from the Muslims! But victory would bring a life sentence, which he figured meant getting off the relatively placid Row and going back to the general population, where Stroman, after his earlier periods inside, had sworn he would never return. He had been thinking. “I’m ready to go,” he told Ziv. “It’s not a life to live. I have enough faith in my religion to accept what’s coming.” He even called his sentence “a blessing.” Ziv pushed back, but Stroman was clear: “Compared to a life sentence, I’m blessed. I’m not going to live like this for the rest of my life.”