The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (16 page)

A
S IT TURNED
out, Rais had been anguished about nothing. When they called him to the stand, they wanted only the barest details—where he lived at that time, the basic facts of his shooting, the identification of that man over there as the shooter. The purpose of bringing him up there was to remind the jury that in addition to the
killing of Patel, who was the focus of the trial, Stroman had killed another man and shot a third. Most of the questions they asked Rais during his few minutes on the stand required monosyllabic confirmations more than answers.

The happy news that Rais could give the jurors was that he’d had three eye surgeries and was awaiting the fourth. He hoped it might restore as much as a quarter of his vision.

The judge thanked him and asked him to step down.

T
HE LAST TWO
witnesses for the defense during this punishment phase were its Hail Mary passes. As the evidence had mounted, it had grown harder to sustain the idea that Stroman would pose no continuing threat, that he would enter prison and somehow become a wallflower. What could be argued—though it might have offended every bone in Stroman’s “True American” body and struck him as typical liberal Democrat hogwash psychobabble—was that his past prevented him from turning out otherwise, that he should be spared because he could only have become what he had.

Mary Connell, the defense’s expert psychologist, took the jury through a PowerPoint presentation about Stroman’s life: “As a baby enters the world, his chances for good development are best if he’s wanted, if he’s loved, if he’s the product of a stable family and a healthy pregnancy, if there’s been prenatal care that’s good, if there hasn’t been toxicity such as alcohol abuse on the part of the mother.” Stroman, she said, knew few of those advantages. She speculated that he could have had fetal alcohol syndrome, given his mother’s habits. She suggested that the back-and-forth between Plano and Seagoville would have disoriented Mark. The incessant needling by Wallace and the swipes about dogs and abortions by Sandra would have injured the boy’s self-esteem and his “confidence that his parent’s going to be there tomorrow and is going to love him and take care of him.”

Dr. Connell sought to frame Stroman’s drug use in a similar way, to push it out of the choice column in the jury’s mind and into the column of predetermination. Once Mark got into meth, she said, he lost a great deal of control over himself. She attributed his rage and propensity to violence to the drug: “People who are using methamphetamine don’t lie around in a stupored state. They have lots of energy; they want to do things. They’re also agitated and aggressive.” She insisted, from her hours of interviewing Mark, that he believed someone was trying to kill him around the time that 9/11 came. She couldn’t tell if this fear was delusional or real, but what mattered was that the fear, combined with the drugs, would have placed Mark on a perpetual battle footing: “He was experiencing paranoid ideation at times and was, in fact, predisposed to suspiciousness and guardedness, as are many people who are drawn to this drug. The drug allows you to stay up and stay hyper-vigilant and keep a watch over your shoulders.”

So when word of 9/11 reached Stroman, Dr. Connell testified, it might have given a tripped-out man a kind of permission: “When he heard about these incidents, he was in a state of heightened agitation, aggression, crazy thinking. And it affected him, perhaps, much as it affected many other people. But I think in many respects it affected him even more, and became for him kind of a license for an outlet for a lot of his aggression. Guns had always been a part of his life. He had a significant arsenal, and he was by now heavily armed, in a highly agitated paranoid state, and he took action. And he represented that he believed that anybody and everybody would have done the same thing if they’d had the nerve.”

Dr. Connell was followed by a psychiatrist, Dr. Stonedale. She believed Stroman suffered from acute stress disorder, a precursor to the better-known post-traumatic stress disorder. Scans of Stroman’s brain, made after his incarceration, had found “generalized status slowing,” which could be consistent with epilepsy. There seemed to be swelling and damage to the brain, perhaps caused by
drugs or by epilepsy. An MRI had found a wedge-shaped section of the brain, in the right frontal lobe, where the blood flow had all but stopped—again, a possible consequence of drug use or of injury. That area of the brain happened, Dr. Stonedale said, to be the area that governs emotion and impulsivity and acting-out. The doctor also noted that Mark was receiving Seroquel in prison—an antipsychotic drug used to treat depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. But Stroman was getting a “sub-therapeutic” dosage of 200 milligrams a day, in Dr. Stonedale’s view, when in fact he needed 600 to 800.

As she closed, the doctor suddenly spoke more bluntly. It happened when Stroman’s lawyer asked if there were adequate programs in the prison system, and from the state more generally, for the addicted and otherwise troubled.

“There’s very few programs, unfortunately,” Dr. Stonedale said. “I work at the Parkland psychiatric emergency room, and we have probably a dozen drug abusers a day coming in looking for programs. Some of them don’t really want to be helped, but a significant number of them do. And there aren’t any programs. There’s nowhere for them to go; there’s no funding. They’ll sit in our emergency room sometimes for twenty-four hours while we’re on the phone begging people to take them in. The system is broken. People doing drugs—you know, yes, no one is making them do it, understandably. But we’re not helping. We’re not doing anything to help them. We wait until they commit a heinous crime, and then put them to death.”

For the jury, it might have been a jarring idea: that Texas didn’t necessarily execute people because they were irredeemable, bone-rotten murderers, but because it didn’t know what to do with them earlier in their lives, as they built up to that crime. It was a simple algorithm to kill people who had killed. But to unravel the knotted problem that Stroman had been for the government over the years—that took time and programs and subtle understanding.

S
TROMAN MAY NOT
have enjoyed the defense offered on his behalf. He believed in the right to make choices, as his manifesto and prison letters showed, and in the sovereignty of those choices in governing a life. He believed that casting a man as helpless robbed him of his dignity. He liked a quote he had clipped: “We don’t rise to the level of our abilities; we fall to the level of our excuses.”

Tom Boston, who attended the trial and who shared many of Mark’s intuitions about these things, wrestled long afterward with whether his buddy could or couldn’t have been otherwise.

“Everybody’s always got a choice, at any point, no matter what part of their life,” he said. “They’ve always got a choice. And they may have a lot more obstacles than the normal person; they may have drawbacks, no matter what their situation. There are people that are quadriplegics, and they think the world’s against them because they don’t have arms and legs. But there is always something they can do. You can’t use excuses. A lot of our society uses excuses, and that’s what probably breeds a lot of the hate.”

As he watched the trial, Tom felt himself swinging between excuses and condemnation in his own assessment of Mark. “I know that he wasn’t in his right mind,” Tom said. “Whether it was drug-induced, whether it was his childhood, or whether it was stress he was going through in life—whatever the reason was, the bottom line was, he wasn’t there. He wasn’t. It wasn’t something a normal person would do. So obviously I knew at that point it was a combination of drugs and stress and all the things he was going through, and he just hit rock-bottom.”

Tom wasn’t sure if this was what they called mitigation in the court, but he also believed that execution was no solution. Maybe a life sentence would work, or maybe a mental hospital. But that belief also wavered the more he thought about it: “When you go back and
you’re like, he’s just a piece of shit trash, do you just get rid of trash or do you keep them around?”

The trouble with the excuses theory was that Tom’s life seemed to contradict its premises. “I was brought up in a dysfunctional family. I was beaten to shit as a child,” he said. His mother was a “pill popper” and merciless in her abuse. Tom thought of himself as a perfect candidate for an Oprah confessional or a Jerry Springer confrontation. “I don’t look back and say, ‘Well, I’m going to do this because I had this as a child.’ I mean, everybody’s got something in their childhood. Nobody has a storybook-perfect deal. And everybody’s got things that set them back. No matter whether it be alcoholism or finance problems or educational problems, whatever, you can come up with a million-zillion excuses. But you’ve gotta overcome that. It’s up to you as an individual.”

However, Tom also sensed the country changing in ways that he figured would nourish more Mark Stromans than Tom Bostons, in those cases where it could tip either way.

“You look back years and years ago, and a family used to be this dad, the mom stayed at home, took care of the children, nurtured the kids, took care of the house—everything,” he said. “Then you start having a bad economy. Bills up, inflation’s up, more cost of food. So then you start breaking up the family unit. Mom’s at work, the dad’s out working, then who’s with the kids? Then the schools. If you got a good school, your kid may turn out all right. That’s the private sector. If you go to public schools, it’s like a war zone, so that’s like a mini-type prison.” He had managed to place his own children in private school.

Though Tom had suffered abuse and knew its toll, a part of him even wondered if modern taboos against hitting one’s children were hurting the young: “I look today now, where kids aren’t getting spanked with a belt, they aren’t getting reprimanded, and our whole society’s going to shit because of things like that. And I’m not saying beat your freaking kids. Your dad would say, ‘I’m gonna
get out the belt.’ And he wouldn’t get it out, but you had to have the threat.”

Tom went on, “You’ve got trouble-makers as kids that don’t have any respect for their parents or people, and they’re off on the wrong track already. So then you can’t discipline the children; the schools can’t discipline children; they’re not getting it at home. They’re little hellions. They’re spoiled.” It begins with rebellions like Mark’s long years earlier, he said, and no one knows how to nip them in the bud: “They get in trouble, they go through the system, and it just snowballs.”

Everybody’s always got a choice
, Tom had said at first. The more he talked, the muddier it got.