The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (36 page)

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.”

Stroman knew, however, that he couldn’t openly admit to this fear. “Because he was so overwhelmed by the love and the fact that all these people cared for him, he was not going to be the party pooper and say, ‘Guys, just leave me alone,’ ” Ziv said.

It reminded Ziv of something he had learned in making a different documentary. He was filming an indigenous community in South America when a man gestured to a sloth nearby and said, “This animal doesn’t know when to die.” Ziv didn’t see his meaning. The villager explained that with certain animals, you wallop them once and they die: simple for them, simple for you. That sloth, though, dies only if you hack its throat. “That’s the reason why we don’t eat its heart, because then we will not know how to die, too,” the villager told him. That seized Ziv. “It took me three days of contemplation—how profound this thing was. I think Mark felt it was time to die.”

BACK IN AUSTIN,
at the Travis County Courthouse downtown, the hearing came to order shortly after 5 p.m. It was past business hours, so the building was mostly deserted. A dozen or so people sat behind the lawyers’ tables in the viewing space on humble blue seats.

Rais had arrived in the city that Monday, two days prior, without even a toothbrush or shaving cream. He had figured he would make his case and go home. Now, at last, after a whole lot of kicking around, his argument had a hearing. As the proceedings began, however, Judge Joseph Hart said he would hear the matter only if the state agreed to delay the execution until after his decision. The execution window was to open in less than an hour. The government lawyers refused. The two sides bickered about why the governor wouldn’t delay the killing even for a few hours. At 5:50 p.m., ten minutes before the deadline, a reporter in the courtroom heard Rais wonder aloud if Stroman was already fastened to the gurney.
Eight minutes later, with the lawyers now in closed chambers with the judge, the reporter noted Rais swaying back and forth in his seat, his hand slowly crushing a white plastic cup. Two minutes later, at the precise execution hour, Rais muttered, “This is how easily lives are torn apart. Just like this cup.”

Around 6:40 p.m., Judge Hart emerged from his chambers. “All rise. Court is now in session, the Honorable Judge Hart presiding,” the bailiff declared.

“This is D-1-GN-112192,” Judge Hart began. He looked over to Rais: “You’ll have to help me with the pronunciation.” Rais softly obliged.

“
Bhuiyan vs. Rick Perry
,” the judge said.

The judge said there would now be a brief hearing on whether he in fact had jurisdiction in the case. The arguments from earlier that morning were rehearsed, and again the judge disappeared into his office. He returned a little after 7 p.m., offering good news for Rais’s side and a solution to the impasse. The state had paused the execution and agreed to keep it on hold during the hearing, with one condition: the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals could immediately and in parallel consider if Hart’s court had jurisdiction to hear this case. It was a shrewd compromise for the state: its attorneys showed respect for legitimacy by participating in the hearing; and, in now requiring two judges rather than one to stop the execution, they were no worse off than before the deal.

Around this time, Wahid got the news that the federal appeals court had turned Rais down on another of their tracks. Wahid messaged his colleagues to submit an appeal, already drafted, to the Supreme Court in Washington. Justice Antonin Scalia would receive their plea and decide on its merits. All this while, Stroman’s own direct, and more customary, appeals had been bouncing around some of the same courts, but none was getting anywhere.

The hearing was operating under an unusual protocol. “The normal local rule is not to have cell phones on,” the judge explained,
looking over to the state attorney. “You may have your cell phone on because you may get a call that I need to know about.”

That call, if it came, would be from the Court of Criminal Appeals, which was now simultaneously reviewing this court’s jurisdiction.

This hearing was Rais’s first and only chance to make his case for Stroman before a judge. First Khurrum Wahid, representing him, framed the issue in terms of timing rather than outcome. Although Rais had battled to save Mark Stroman from the death sentence, the request was more narrowly described now. “The bottom line,” Wahid said, “is that, under Texas law, Mr. Bhuiyan, as a victim, has rights. And if those rights are not enforceable, then there really are no rights. And we simply need the time to allow him to enforce those rights and execute what he wants, which is victim-offender mediation dialogue.” He said Rais had spoken to other targets of violent crime who had undergone mediation and “found closure to the hole that was created when they became victims.”

As Wahid spoke, he couldn’t help but look past Judge Hart to the wall clock behind him. He felt each minute’s passage acutely. To litigate an execution an hour and a half after it was meant to occur was to walk on strange, unfamiliar terrain. In the middle of his argument, the state attorney’s phone rang. He picked up, but the other court had no news as yet. “I apologize, Judge. No updates at the moment,” the state attorney said.

Wahid quickly sketched the facts of Rais’s life—his coming to America, his being shot, his surgeries, his professional reinvention. He explained that it had not occurred to Rais until very recently to seek mediation, and could not have occurred to him given all he confronted. If Judge Hart didn’t block the execution tonight and allow for mediation with Stroman, Rais would “never have that opportunity to be fulfilled”—an experience, Wahid added, that some participants had compared to “starting life over again.” On the other hand, if the judge blocked the execution, all it would mean for the state was postponement of the inevitable: “The harm to the defendant is they
would have to re-set up for this particular execution. And all things being equal, that happens pretty often for other reasons in the State of Texas.”

Wahid addressed head-on the inherent strangeness of his plea: “I think what confuses everyone in this whole event is that he is the victim of that defendant, and that’s why it’s so unusual. No one has seen this before. Why would the victim want to save this person’s life? Well, look at it another way. The victim wants to save his own life. That’s what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to go through a process where he can come out and hit the reset button.”

Now the state attorney rose to argue that Rais had in fact received multiple communications from the government, right after the shooting and then after the trial, giving him a chance to request mediation with his attacker. Rais had never answered, the state attorney said.

It was time for testimony. “You may call your first witness,” Judge Hart told Wahid.

Rais walked up to the stand, swore the oath, and spelled his name for the court reporter. Under questioning by Wahid, he began by denying that he had received any invitation to mediation with Stroman. Even if he had, he would have been unable to process it: “I don’t remember at this moment any of these documents, because after I was shot I was going through a tremendous amount of depression and a tremendous amount of trauma, and I don’t know what was going through that time in my mind.”

Rais’s voice was low and melancholy, without any of his usual energy. But it wasn’t until Wahid asked him to retell some of the story of his recovery that he gave in and cried as he spoke: “Well, this crime put me into a situation—I never would have imagined that I would be going through this thing in my life in U.S.A. I was going through one after one disaster mentally, psychologically, physically, where I got my life back, but I was in a situation that I didn’t know where the money was coming from for the surgery. I had no money
in my pocket. Many a times I called the doctor’s office to get some sample medicine.”

His voice was shaking and cracking into sobs. He spoke now of Abida, trading in his usual term “fiancée” for “wife,” as she had been technically and on paper but in no other sense: “My wife was under tremendous amount of parental pressure back home, because her parents didn’t want her to be with me, and they were pushing her to marry somebody else, and she was keep calling me and putting on me lots and lots of pressure that I had to go back, but I couldn’t go back because of my eye surgery. The doctors didn’t want me to go, because they thought that I would have lost my eye forever. It was tremendous amount of pressure that my dad had a stroke and he survived, because of my shooting incident, and I could not go and see my parents. I mean, I have no clue how I survived that couple of years after I was shot. And the pain I was in”—now his crying grew fierce—“was unbearable. The way Mark Stroman completely destroyed my life. And I could not think straight and think clearly, that I had to go through all this kind of situation in my life in one of the best countries in the world.”

He again denied that the state had apprised him of his rights as a victim, or even about the execution date, which he said he had learned from Rick Halperin. Rais had become calmer, but he broke down again when Wahid asked what he imagined getting out of meeting Stroman a second time.

He paused for long seconds. “I came to this country”—that phrase made him cry harder—“to fulfill my lifelong dream to have education”—he was almost wailing now—“and to experience the American dream. Before in my country, I had vision 20/10 back home. He took that thing from my life. He put me in a situation that I would never, ever be able to fly. I lost the vision in my right eye. And the trauma he caused, not only in my life—my parents’ life, my entire career life.”

His voice became inaudible through the crying for a moment.
“I want to see him,” Rais suddenly declared. “I want to talk to him personally. I want to connect to him in a human way. I want to see that he’s a human being like me. I want him to explain many things, many questions which I don’t know at this moment—to find out in course of time if I get a chance to talk to him. I would love him to explain why, what, how. When he shot me, he was standing, looking at me. What was going through his mind, before he pulled the trigger? Did he ever thought about his kids? That I am someone’s kid as well? When I was crying ‘Mom’ again and again, what was going through his mind?” Rais’s voice quivered here again.