The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (34 page)

So Rais’s legal team filed a few dozen pages of briefs that suggested, among other things, that Governor Perry should consider what Islamic law had to say about the situation.

As if to set the tone for its arguments, the first item in the lawsuit’s “Statement of Material Facts” was this: “Plaintiff is a United States citizen who is Muslim.”

In the usual manner with such cases, the strategy was to throw all kinds of arguments at the judge and pray that one would stick. Broadly, though, the lawsuit advanced three claims in support of its plea that Stroman not be executed the following week.

The first was the most conventional, and where a less gumptious
plaintiff might have ended. The suit noted that Article 56.02 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure lays out certain victims’ rights, of which one is “the right to request victim-offender mediation coordinated by the victim services division of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.” Rais argued that no one had informed him of this right around the time of the attacks, and that, once he learned about it, he was thwarted from making use of it. “Plaintiff is a victim,” the lawsuit said. “As such, he did not want to rush into a public spotlight. Had he only known his rights, he would have been quietly pressing for his rights for a long time.” The suit said Rais needed to meet Stroman—and, more than that, to succeed in changing him—in order to heal: “Plaintiff’s own ability to reach a cathartic point in his own recovery depends very much on his being able to make full efforts to help Mark Ströman to reach his full potential, and to overcome the very negative lessons that he was taught as a child.”

The second line of argument was that Rais was being denied his constitutional rights as an American because of the state’s refusal to honor his right as a Muslim to offer mercy. “As a Muslim, Plaintiff is of the belief that when he forgives or promotes mercy for his attacker, the government should no longer have a duty or a right to exact the ultimate punishment upon Mr. Stroman,” the lawsuit said.

Rais’s brief offered a tutorial in Shariah law to make his point: “The first lesson that might come as a surprise to many people is that Islamic law does not call for mandatory killing of everyone who commits murder, or the chopping off of hands at the first opportunity. Rather, while murder is obviously strongly condemned, mercy is vigorously upheld.” The brief then gave this quotation from the Koran, chapter 5, verse 32: “If anyone kills a … it would be as if he killed all people. And if anyone saves a life, it would be as if he saved the life of all people.” The quotation’s stray “a” followed by that ellipsis was easily overlooked, but if the judge had Googled it, he might have been surprised. The “a” was the beginning of a clause that Rais’s legal team redacted, and that clause read: “any person who
had not committed murder or horrendous crimes.” The full version (in a slightly different translation from that in the legal brief) read: “Anyone who murders any person who had not committed murder or horrendous crimes, it shall be as if he murdered all the people.” Rais was right about the Koran calling for mercy, but this citation didn’t apply to murderers like Stroman.

More solid support came from the famous “eye for an eye” passage, in chapter 5, verse 45: “The life for the life, and the eye for the eye, and the nose for the nose, and the ear for the ear, and the tooth for the tooth, and for wounds retaliation. But whoso forgoeth it in the way of charity it shall be expiation for him.”

The lawsuit argued that, in light of these passages, it was Rais’s religious duty to seek mercy. It acknowledged that this was an uphill battle: “Perhaps it has been true in Christian society at various times, but the process of showing mercy is more integrated into the Islamic legal tradition today than it is in many Western legal systems.” The suit went further in suggesting that Rais would suffer religious discrimination if Texas denied him the chance to exonerate his attacker: the state often listens to victims whose beliefs lead them to seek vengeance, it argued, but ignores those whose faith calls for mercy. The suit also claimed that Rais was being denied equal treatment under the law because Texas granted mediation to victims of lesser crimes but not as readily to those ensnared in capital punishment cases.

The third, and perhaps most surprising, argument was the suggestion that Texas revert to the good old days when victims and perpetrators, without too much meddling from the state, resolved their differences bilaterally. This argument, too, emanated from a reading of Shariah law. It was an idea that endured in many Islamic societies, where victims have some influence over a perpetrator’s punishment, with an option in some cases to reach a financial settlement or grant mercy instead of sending the accused to prison or death. Bilateral justice was also, of course, how an earlier era’s disputes
were resolved right here in Texas, as shown in all those movies that had made Abida fear the place years before. The lawsuit argued that in the shift away from a direct victim-perpetrator connection, the virtue of mercy had fallen away. And it had an interesting source of support: a growing movement in the United States itself in favor of so-called restorative justice, of which one component is a greater emphasis on the victim-perpetrator relationship.

“The move towards recognizing victims’ rights has come about primarily in the last quarter century, representing a shift back towards the way that the judicial system used to operate when the United States was founded, and for some time afterwards,” the lawsuit said. It was quick to distance itself from a return to simple vigilantism: “Obviously society must excise corruption from the system of justice; it may well be that society should discourage the cycle of revenge; but there was never any room for the criticism of victims who were interested in restorative justice, or who advocated compassion.” This the suit wanted to change, and Shariah law, it submitted, offered a way forward. It offered an elaborate explanation of the rules of diyat, or blood money: a practice under Shariah law of compensating a family for its dead relatives, often as a substitute for prison time or execution. (Incidentally, and unbeknownst to Rais’s team, four months earlier, in a court in Lahore, Pakistan, a jailed CIA officer named Raymond Davis had been freed by diyat
:
200 million Pakistani rupees in exchange for forgiveness from the relatives of the men he shot.)

So Rais, a victim of an American version of tribal law (“We was wanting justice,” Stroman had said), was now reaching back to the ideas of his own, Islamic tradition of tribal law to seek support for showing Stroman forgiveness. A violent notion of bilateral justice—justice unmediated by the state—was being met by a nonviolent one. Rais’s arguments could come across as a call for kangaroo justice, and yet they had many strange echoes. They resonated with Stroman’s idea of taking matters into his own hands, but also with theories
gaining ground in the restorative justice field and even with the movement across the nation, and in Texas especially, toward more robust victims’ rights. But it was in Shariah law that the idea had its amplest expression, the lawsuit said.

“In Islam,” the lawsuit said, “the victim is hugely respected. This has not been Plaintiff’s experience of the judicial process in Texas to date.”

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HAT OLD “TRUE AMERICAN”
manifesto, which Stroman had loved and circulated from prison, declared: “My uncles and forefathers shouldn’t have had to die in vain so you can leave the country you were born in to come here and disrespect ours and make us bend to your will.” But a man whose hours are dwindling can become flexible, or at least allow his lawyer to be flexible on his behalf. Which is how Mark Stroman went on record calling for the application of Shariah law in a Texas court of law.

As Rais pursued his case, Stroman’s lawyer, Lydia Brandt, was mounting her own appeals. The two sides were collaborating, and it showed: certain arguments appeared in similar form in both sides’ filings, so that the two became almost indistinguishable at times. The two litigants, who had faced each other in hostility all those years ago at the Buckner Food Mart, now copied ideas from each other’s documents, plagiarizing shamelessly, as if to underscore that they now played for the same team.

One of Stroman’s briefs spoke, as did Rais’s, of reviving what was lost in the evolution of modern justice systems: “In enforcing the criminal law, the judicial process has evolved over hundreds of years primarily to replace vigilantism and the terrible cycle of revenge. Society gradually sought to place limitations on the degree of punishment so that a blood feud between two families would not continue wreaking havoc for generations.” However, the brief said,
this process had perhaps gone too far, shutting out a victim’s voice when that voice wants to show kindness instead of anger: “There is nothing illogical about a system where society does not always fulfil the victim’s desire for revenge, but always respects the victim’s desire for mercy.”

Perhaps the most unusual strategy Stroman’s lawyer employed was attempting reverse psychology on the Texas judiciary. Failing to spare Stroman’s life, she argued, would amount to Texas accepting the moral superiority of Shariah law—and we can’t let that happen, can we now?

“It is perhaps ironic, given the 9/11 spark that precipitated these tragedies, that Islamic (or Shari’a) law would not permit executions under these circumstances,” Stroman’s brief said. “The essence of a judicial process is that the victims cannot unilaterally demand vengeance—the state procedure is placed between the perpetrator and the victim to avoid the cycle of revenge. However, at the other end of the pendulum, there is no moral basis for suggesting that the victims cannot exercise mercy. If they called for mercy in an Islamic court, their wishes would be respected.”

The brief opined, “It would be sadly ironic if the law of Texas were unable to show respect equal or greater to Shari’a law for a compassionate victim of crime.” Stroman’s lawyer now went a step further, arguing that it was unconstitutional to execute Stroman because doing so would admit American inferiority: “The U.S. and Texas Constitutions do not permit the execution of a person when the victims oppose it because the law of the United States and of the state of Texas is not somehow inferior to Islamic or Shari’a law.”

Mark Stroman had to be saved, in other words, because not saving him would admit that his beloved country was second-best.

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his was, Stroman was certain, either the end or the start. “If I’m allowed to live past the 20th of July, I will take that as a sign from God that my work has just begun,” he wrote on his blog. As the days dwindled, he was full of motion—corresponding, thanking, bloviating, advising, giving interviews, taping statements for his loved ones, welcoming visitors.

“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.”