The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (33 page)

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 preceded 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.”

As a high schooler at the Sylhet Cadet College, Rais had a public-speaking class every Thursday. All he had to do was stand and say something for three minutes, maybe five max. He was so shy then that he could barely manage. Now Rais found himself able, against all odds, to speak extemporaneously without any trouble. “It came automatically,” he said. “I didn’t push myself to go and have to prepare myself. It was a flow; it came out of me.”

Rais learned to be unfazed by the cameras and microphones jammed in his face. Halperin noticed that his protégé stopped needing notes. He began to trust in the power of his story. He mastered
the politician’s art of foreswearing irony and irreverence, revealing nothing of himself but his devotion to the cause. He learned to open sentences with “Well,” to buy himself that extra second. He started pushing his hands out in front of him when he spoke, to underscore a point. In his pursuit of holy mercy, he had acquired something of the American hustler about him.

While most of his audiences were totally sympathetic, Rais was tested when, on the final stop of the tour, he met a skeptical, even faintly hostile, crowd in London.

The event was in the evening at the West London Islamic Center in Ealing. The large rectangular room was packed with fellow Muslims—perhaps a hundred or more—seated in two clusters of chairs. A few women sat in front, but the room was dominated by young men. With hardly any seats remaining, some of them were standing by the windows. It was the first time since the campaign was launched that Rais was addressing kin of the faith. He stood at a table with a lectern and began to speak. When he got to the part about forgiveness, justifying it in the name of his God, their God, Halperin remembers a man in the back raising his hand. The man, without being called on, began to talk, challenging Rais, who at first didn’t acknowledge him. Halperin recalled the moment like this: “He said, ‘Who are you as a Muslim to forgive a Christian? What right do you have to do that?’ Then this man went off on American policy in the Middle East and ‘Where is the forgiveness for all the Muslims that Americans were killing or had killed in Iraq and Palestine and Afghanistan?’ ”

Halperin added, “When he finally stopped, I remember, he was just angry and emotional and loud. And Rais said, ‘I’m not an Islamic scholar. I know that the Koran teaches forgiveness.’ And he recited a passage or two, and that obviously was not the answer the man wanted to hear, and he started interrupting Rais again as he stood up and walked out.”

Rais remembered it this way: “I thought it would be easy to share my story of forgiveness with them and didn’t have to explain the
message of forgiveness in the light of Islamic teachings. But at the beginning, some in the audience thought I was speaking on behalf of the U.S. government.” He could understand their feelings but tried to steer them otherwise: “I told them my trip is completely personal to share my own story; it’s not a politically motivated trip.”

When the time came for questions, hands soared. Not every questioner was supportive. “It was the only audience where that large a percentage of the questions were critical of him for his act of forgiveness,” Halperin said. He figured it was 50-50 positive-to-negative; Rais estimated 70-30. Some people rose and told Rais that they totally disagreed with him about forgiveness, for many of the same reasons as the angry man who walked out, but that they respected what he was trying to do for the faith. When the event finished, Halperin was astonished to see virtually the entire audience line up single file to shake Rais’s hand. Some just thanked him; others stopped and talked awhile. Whatever they thought of his campaign, several of them told Rais, he had placed true Islam on display for the world—a religion of love and mercy, not bloodlust.

“Thank you for doing this,” they said over and over, shaking Rais’s hand and that of his Jewish-Texan-American sidekick. A few of them, Rais said, asked for his autograph.

U
NTIL THAT MOMENT,
Rais and his team had followed two interlocking strategies: to move public opinion to their side, and meanwhile to petition the Texas authorities to either commute or delay Stroman’s execution. The first strategy was working, but the second was having little effect. They had gone to the DA, had contacted prison officials to seek mediation with Stroman, had asked the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to recommend clemency to Governor Rick Perry. Each path dead-ended.

“Not only in our state in Texas but around the country and around
the world, people were overwhelmingly in support and awe of his actions or his desire to save Mark Stroman’s life,” Halperin said of Rais. “They supported him wholeheartedly. So in the court of public opinion, we seemed to be winning. But we weren’t gaining much ground with the death-penalty apparatus here in the state of Texas.”

At Reprieve, Clive Stafford Smith was convinced that Rais had a compelling legal case in America if he wanted one. The asking-nicely strategy was failing, and as Rais returned from Europe, Stroman had less than two weeks left on the planet, barring some miracle. Reprieve suggested that Rais file a lawsuit claiming that he had been denied his right under Texas law to victim-offender mediation. Stafford Smith saw in him, as Halperin did, an unusual commando in the long-running war against capital punishment. Rais agreed with the plan.

He researched his options for a lawyer and came upon one named Khurrum Wahid. Wahid was a high-profile defense attorney based in Miami and had made a name for himself representing Muslims caught in the antiterror dragnet. Like Stafford Smith, he had gotten himself involved with Guantánamo cases, which wasn’t necessarily the association Rais needed for his campaign. Wahid offered to take the case for free, though, and they had a deal.

On Wednesday, July 13, a week before the execution date, with Stroman’s team working in parallel on more conventional appeals, Rais went to court with the help of his new attorney. He did so with characteristic ambition, filing a lawsuit that would come to be known as
Bhuiyan vs. Perry
. That very week, the state’s square-jawed charmer of a governor, Rick Perry, was much in the news. A flailing Republican Party, worried by the ongoing presidential contest, was looking to transfuse fresh blood into the race. Perry had said he was thinking about it. He had recently announced that he would be going ahead, despite protest, with his massive prayer event for evangelical Christians at the Reliant Stadium in Houston. He had also let it be known, lest anyone think he had fewer foreign-policy bona fides
than Herman Cain, that he and his wife had just lunched, in Austin, with former President and Mrs. Musharraf of Pakistan. In a month’s time, he would be a full-fledged presidential candidate, and even a front-runner. And in that moment when his star was beginning to rise over the country, he became a defendant in an obscure case in state court. The plaintiff was Rais, whose lawsuit made some of the more unusual arguments ever to land before a Texas judge.

“THE MEANING OF
this Shariah law is not bad,” Rais said. “It’s really, actually, good. But we people in this country, we give the word a bad name.” Across the country, fear of Shariah was ascendant. Just in the previous year or so, half of American states were said to have considered formally prohibiting judges from relying on Shariah, the ancient Islamic legal code, or other foreign law—even though actual evidence of judges doing so was hard to come by. Oklahoma had amended its state constitution to bar Shariah from its courts. Texas was especially hostile terrain for arguments citing Shariah. But Rais was a serial survivor who wrote his own rules, and he wanted his lawsuit not only to save a life but also to bend perceptions of Islam and, specifically, of Shariah. He called it “taking back the word.” If you used the word in the good way before a court, maybe people would begin to hear it as Rais did.