Mark Stroman was convicted of one killing and executed for it. In the weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks he attacked three men in the Dallas area whom he took to be Arabs. Waqar Hasan died on September 15 in Dallas. Rais Bhuiyan was wounded on September 21, also in Dallas, and survived. Vasudev Patel died on October 4 in Mesquite, east of the city. All three men were from South Asia: Hasan from Pakistan, Patel from India and Bhuiyan from Bangladesh.
Dallas County prosecutors tried Stroman only for the Patel killing, which took place during an attempted robbery and was therefore a capital offense under Texas law. A jury convicted him of capital murder in April 2002, and he was sentenced to death. The Hasan killing and the attack on Bhuiyan were never tried, though Stroman admitted both. The case became widely known in 2011, when Bhuiyan, the man he had wounded, forgave him, asked the state to spare him, and took the request to the governor and the courts. Stroman was executed in Huntsville on July 20, 2011.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice records Mark Anthony Stroman's birth date as October 13, 1969. It lists his schooling as ending after the eighth grade and his occupations as baker and laborer. His adult record, according to the department, included convictions for burglary, theft, credit card abuse and robbery, and he was paroled from a Dallas County sentence in 1991. The Associated Press, summarizing court documents, described two prison terms and two paroles, and a juvenile record that began with a robbery at the age of 12. At the punishment stage of his trial, police officers read to the jury from juvenile reports of 1981 and 1983 that concerned a robbery-type incident and the unauthorized use of a vehicle.
The defense case at his trial turned on his upbringing. According to the Associated Press, defense lawyers presented testimony about an abusive childhood, alcoholic parents, drug use and behavioral problems. The federal court that later reviewed the record described the mitigation case as one of abuse, neglect and an untreated behavioral disorder, supported by expert testimony. Amnesty International, summarizing the sentencing evidence, added that the experts described post-traumatic stress and brain damage. A former employer who spoke to a PBS program in 2014 said he had hired Stroman several years before 2001, found him a good worker at first, and then dismissed him over his racist views. "I saw him trying to better himself and then he just broke," the employer said.
In September 2001 Stroman was 31 years old, according to the Dallas Observer, and had a history of drug use. The Associated Press reported that he was free on bond on a separate criminal charge when the attacks on the three men began. Court documents described him as saying he belonged to the Aryan Brotherhood, a white supremacist prison gang; he later denied being a white supremacist and pointed out that his wife was Hispanic.
Stroman gave several explanations for what he did, and they do not all fit together. A fellow inmate testified that Stroman had told him his country "hadn't done their job so he was going to do it for us," as the federal district court recorded in 2009. The Fifth Circuit repeated the remark in 2010. He also said that a sister had died when the World Trade Center collapsed. Prosecutors said that court documents showed no firm evidence that such a sister existed, and the Dallas Observer reported that the claim was never verified.
His own later statements, made from death row, mixed defiance and regret. On a website about his case he wrote, in a passage quoted by the Press Trust of India, "I wanted those Arabs to feel the same sense of vulnerability and uncertainty on American soil." In a statement the Associated Press also quoted, he said he had made a "terrible mistake out of love, grief and anger." He told a reporter, as the Observer later recalled, "I did what every American wanted to do but didn't." In an interview from death row he rejected the picture of him that the media had drawn, and on the website he also wrote, "I cannot tell you that I am an innocent man."
None of the three men he attacked was an Arab. The Associated Press noted that all three were from South Asia. Prosecutors also said that Stroman had told a fellow inmate of plans for a further attack at a shopping mall in the Dallas area.
Waqar Hasan was 46 years old. He had been born in Pakistan and had moved to Dallas in 2001. He was the father of four children. According to the Dallas Morning News, he was killed on September 15, 2001, four days after the attacks on New York and Washington, and nothing was taken from him. The attack took place in the Pleasant Grove district of Dallas, according to the Advocate, a Dallas neighborhood magazine.
Stroman was charged in the Hasan killing but was not tried for it. The federal court that reviewed his conviction in 2009 recorded that a fellow inmate said Stroman had spoken of the Hasan killing as his ninth crime of this kind. That figure rests on the inmate's account alone.
Rais Bhuiyan was 27. He had come to the United States from Bangladesh in 1999, and in Bangladesh he had been an air force officer. On September 21, 2001, ten days after the attacks, Stroman attacked him in Dallas. He survived his wounds, which Salon later reported required four operations. As PBS told the story in 2014, the hospital discharged him because he had no insurance, and he lost his apartment and his fiancee; his father suffered a stroke when he heard the news.
The Dallas Morning News reported that Stroman was also charged in this attack and was not tried for it. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' 2011 order referred to him as the victim of an extraneous offense, meaning a crime other than the one for which Stroman was convicted. Bhuiyan was the only one of the three men to survive, and in time he became the most prominent voice in the case.
Vasudev Patel was 49. He had been born in India and had lived in the United States since 1983. He was married and had two children. He was killed in Mesquite on October 4, 2001, during an attempted robbery. A recording of the killing was later played to the jury. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice summarizes the offense in one sentence: on October 4, 2001, in Mesquite, Stroman killed a 49-year-old man during an attempted robbery.
The federal court recorded that Patel was unarmed and that the attempted robbery was captured by a store camera. The court also noted that the Hasan and Bhuiyan attacks did not involve a robbery, while this one did. That difference shaped the whole prosecution. A reviewer of Anand Giridharadas's later book on the case, Robert Little, noted that a murder committed out of hatred could, under Texas law, bring only a sentence of life in prison, while a killing in the course of a robbery could bring a death sentence. Laura Miller, reviewing the same book for Salon, wrote that prosecutors charged the Patel killing as a capital murder in the course of a robbery because that charge made Stroman eligible for the death penalty. Both writers presented this as the logic behind the charge, not as a statement by the prosecutors themselves.
Mesquite police arrested Stroman after the Patel killing. The date is given differently in the record. The Dallas Morning News dated the arrest October 5, 2001, and Amnesty International also described it as the day after the killing, while the Associated Press wrote that police arrested him on the day Patel was killed. The Associated Press added that he confessed. The Dallas Morning News reported that he confessed to all three attacks after his arrest, and he described the other two in a television interview.
Court documents summarized by the Associated Press said that he told the authorities he belonged to the Aryan Brotherhood. He called the attacks patriotic, and ABC7 New York reported in July 2011 that he spoke of a "patriotic duty" to kill people of Middle Eastern descent. The federal court that reviewed the case in 2009 wrote that he admitted the crimes and showed no remorse for any of them.
Stroman was charged on November 15, 2001, according to the federal court. The charge was capital murder, under section 19.03(a)(2) of the Texas Penal Code, the provision covering a killing committed in the course of robbing or attempting to rob the victim. The case was tried in the 292nd Judicial District Court in Dallas County under cause number F01-40949-V(A). State District Judge Henry Wade Jr. read the verdict, according to the Morning News. The prosecutor was Greg Davis and the defense lawyer was Jim Oatman.
The Hasan and Bhuiyan cases were not brought to trial. The Associated Press wrote that Stroman was charged with the Hasan killing but not tried for it, and the Morning News reported the same of both Dallas attacks.
The trial ran for three days of testimony before a Dallas County jury, the Morning News reported, and the jurors deliberated for less than four hours. A recording from the store's camera, which showed the attempted robbery and the killing, was played in court. A fellow inmate testified at the trial about what Stroman had told him about his motive and about the crimes. The federal court quoted from that testimony in 2009 and recorded that Stroman had called the Hasan killing his ninth crime of this kind and had spoken of a planned attack at a shopping mall.
The jury convicted Stroman of capital murder. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stated the conviction as a jury finding that he killed Vasudev Patel "while in the course of robbing or attempting to rob him." The trial then moved to the sentencing stage. The records give the dates differently. The petition that Stroman later filed in federal court gave April 2, 2002 as the day the punishment phase began, the federal court and the state habeas court gave April 4, 2002 as the date of the guilty verdict, and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice received him on death row on April 5, 2002. The Dallas Morning News account of the sentence is dated April 5, 2002.
The sentencing stage brought the other attacks before the jury, through the inmate's account of the Hasan killing and of the planned mall attack. The state also offered the juvenile police reports of 1981 and 1983 through two officers. Hasan's relatives were in the courtroom. The Associated Press, citing the Dallas Morning News, wrote that Stroman made an obscene gesture at them during the punishment phase. The defense called an expert witness, a woman. In cross-examination the state asked the expert about her earlier testimony for the defense in other death penalty cases, and the Court of Criminal Appeals later considered this line of questioning on appeal.
The jury answered the special issues that Texas law requires at the end of a capital trial, under article 37.071 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and the trial judge sentenced Stroman to death. In the Morning News account, Stroman nodded when the verdict was read and said, "Thank you, sir."
Prosecutor Greg Davis told the jury that the attacks were committed out of "pure hatred." He called Stroman "just a common vigilante" and "anything but a patriot." The defense argued that Stroman's "chaotic mind" had turned his white separatism into a violent act he saw as patriotic, and that "He thought he was being a hero."
Outside the courtroom the widows of Patel and Hasan left without comment. A relative of Patel said the family was "very happy with the verdict." Stroman's own sister-in-law told the Morning News that he "didn't do right," but added that "American justice failed again."
Stroman's sentence was reviewed in Texas courts, in federal court and in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence on November 19, 2003, in an unpublished opinion by Judge Keasler. Stroman raised six points: that the death penalty is cruel and unusual in light of wrongful convictions across the country; that the state had to prove the absence of mitigating circumstances beyond a reasonable doubt; that the "12-10 rule" in article 37.071 was unconstitutional; that terms such as "moral blameworthiness" needed a definition; that the trial court should have allowed his family to plead for mercy; and that the state improperly impeached his expert witness. The court overruled every point, holding in the last instance that the objection had not been made at trial. The U.S. Supreme Court denied review on June 28, 2004.
He filed his first state habeas application on November 13, 2003. The state habeas judge recommended that relief be denied on May 26, 2005, and on July 27, 2005 the Court of Criminal Appeals adopted the trial court's findings and denied the application without a hearing.
Stroman filed a federal petition on July 24, 2006 and an amended petition with nine grounds on September 29, 2007. A magistrate judge recommended denial on August 21, 2008. On September 28, 2009 Chief Judge Sidney A. Fitzwater of the Northern District of Texas denied the petition and dismissed the case. Several of the claims, including a claim of actual innocence that rested on mental-state evidence, were found to be procedurally barred, because he had not raised them in state court. The court rejected the argument that the failure of his state habeas counsel excused that default, and it found that the mental-state evidence did not meet the standard for actual innocence. It also denied two claims of ineffective assistance, one over the seating of a juror and one over a failure to object to hearsay about his juvenile record, as reasonable strategy, and it denied a final ground.
On December 27, 2010 the Fifth Circuit refused him a certificate of appealability. The court said, "There is no constitutional right to counsel in post-conviction proceedings." It wrote that Stroman had shown no remorse and had written prison poetry expressing pride in the crimes. The Supreme Court denied his petition for certiorari on June 27, 2011, in case No. 10-9873.
Stroman was held on Texas's death row, at the Polunsky Unit near Livingston, according to the Christian Science Monitor. His statements from those years moved between anger and regret. In 2004 and 2005, according to the Dallas Observer, he expressed remorse in media interviews, though he never wrote to Bhuiyan directly. Rick Halperin, the director of the human rights program at Southern Methodist University, corresponded with him, and the Observer reported that Stroman wrote to Halperin expressing deep remorse. He kept a blog, "Tales from a Dead Man," in which, the Monitor wrote, the tone moved from angry and unrepentant to remorseful over the years, and he said that prison had changed him into a new person. Prison officials said that he had avoided serious trouble in recent years, though a search of his cell in 2008 turned up contraband, according to the Associated Press.
His family largely stayed away. Laura Miller, in Salon, wrote that his sisters doubted that his remorse was genuine, and that his children had struggled with addiction, crime and poverty, as he had. The former employer who spoke to PBS was also skeptical. "Mark was such a conman and very intellectual that he could con a con," he said. Others took Stroman's change at face value. Bhuiyan himself said he came to believe that Stroman was "a different person."
Bhuiyan's own account, as told on PBS and in his oral history for the Texas After Violence Project, was that he was driven by a promise he made to God when he thought he would die: that if he lived, he would do good with his life. He went on a pilgrimage to Mecca with his mother, and he decided afterward, he said, that "I need to forgive him in public and do something to save the life." In his lawsuit he argued that his Muslim faith required him to forgive.
He contacted Halperin, an anti-death-penalty advocate and former chair of Amnesty International, about a year before the execution, according to the SMU Daily Campus. In May 2011 a report in the university's news archive said that Bhuiyan planned to ask for a stay of execution and an end to what he called the cycle of violence. He called September 21, the day he was attacked, his new birthday. At a talk at SMU's Perkins School of Theology, reported by the Dallas Observer, he asked that the sentence be reduced to life in prison. He said his mother had taught him to forgive rather than retaliate, called Stroman "ignorant," and said that executing him would mean "losing everything." "I strongly believe executing him is not a solution," he said at a press conference.
Relatives of the two men who died were heard as well. Hasan's brother-in-law told the Observer that the family forgave Stroman, and told the Daily Texan, "We don't believe in revenge." Hasan's widow, the Observer reported, sent a notarized letter to the Dallas County District Attorney's office in support of commuting the sentence. Patel's family had not publicly commented on the appeal. A relative of Patel had said the family was happy with the verdict in 2002. In July 2011 Patel's widow told the district attorney's office that she wished to express no opinion, and the office said that no one had her permission to speak for her. Bhuiyan said that the victims' relatives agreed that Stroman should be spared, and prosecutors disputed this.
Salon wrote that Bhuiyan hoped to enlist Stroman in a campaign against white supremacism and Islamophobia, and he told reporters that Stroman could become a spokesman against hate crimes if given the chance.
In the second week of July 2011 the case moved quickly. On July 12 Stroman filed a subsequent state habeas application, and the Court of Criminal Appeals dismissed it on July 14. In the week before the execution, Bhuiyan stood on the steps of the Travis County Courthouse in Austin and asked state officials to reduce the sentence to life in prison. "Please do the right thing, save a human life, please," he said, according to CBS News. He said he had never hated Stroman and that "I understand what he did was out of ignorance."
He sued Perry and other state officials in Travis County District Court. He argued that the Texas Crime Victim's Bill of Rights guaranteed him access to victim-offender mediation, coordinated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, and that the state had ignored his requests to meet Stroman. He said he had not learned of this right until May. His lawyer, Khurrum Wahid, argued that the request rested on Bhuiyan's religious belief and that denying it burdened his freedom of religion and expression. Perry's office asked that the case be moved to federal court, and a Travis County judge agreed on July 18. A spokeswoman for the governor said that clemency would require a favorable recommendation from the Board of Pardons and Paroles.
Stroman's own lawyer filed a petition in the Supreme Court arguing that his trial and earlier appellate lawyers had failed to present the story of how he arrived at the attacks. The state replied that the jury had in fact heard testimony about his abusive childhood, his alcoholic parents, his drug use and his behavioral problems. The lawyer also cited Bhuiyan's stand, which she called a "significant surprise," in the filing.
Amnesty International issued an urgent action on June 28, 2011, asking the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles and Governor Perry to commute the sentence. The organization opposes the death penalty in all cases.
The execution was set for 6 p.m. Central time on Wednesday, July 20, 2011, in the Huntsville Unit. On the afternoon of July 20 a federal judge in Austin, Lee Yeakel, refused to halt it. The Daily Texan reported that he said he had no authority to intervene and that granting clemency would damage the criminal justice system. Amnesty International summarized his reasoning as a finding that harm to the system would outweigh the "irreversible injuries" Bhuiyan described. An assistant attorney general argued that Bhuiyan was a third party to the trial and that the federal court lacked jurisdiction. Bhuiyan's lawyers appealed to the Fifth Circuit, which denied the appeal. They went on to the Supreme Court, where Justice Antonin Scalia denied the request. Separately, the Court of Criminal Appeals issued a per curiam order in State ex rel. Abbott v. Hart, granting the attorney general leave to file a writ of prohibition and ordering the Travis County judge to enter no order staying the execution. The Supreme Court denied Stroman's own application for a stay, which Scalia referred to the full Court, and his petition for rehearing, on the same day.
The courts heard the last appeals while the execution was delayed. Stroman was pronounced dead at 8:53 p.m. Five friends watched through a window, according to CBS News, and Stroman told them he loved them. In his last statement he said he was at peace, and he asked for an end to hatred: "Hate is going on in this world and it has to stop. Hate causes a lifetime of pain," the SMU Daily Campus reported. According to CBS News he added, "God bless America. God bless everyone," and said to the warden, "Let's do this damn thing." The Texas Department of Criminal Justice's record of the statement says he described himself as a proud Texan and American, thanked the director and others, expressed love for his family and said it had been a great honor.
Stroman was 41. His was the eighth execution in Texas in 2011, according to the Associated Press.
Hours earlier Bhuiyan had spoken to him by telephone, according to his oral history, and the Dallas Observer wrote that the call lasted eight seconds. Bhuiyan said he wished he could have talked to him more. He told PBS that Stroman thanked him and called him "bro." Bhuiyan said he forgave Stroman many times, including seconds before the execution.
Bhuiyan returned to the information technology career he had hoped for when he moved to the United States. He became a speaker on forgiveness, hate and mercy at colleges and schools across the country, and he became the head of World Without Hate, a nonprofit that works on tolerance and forgiveness, according to the Dallas Observer and PBS. He used his income, according to a review of the book in the National Catholic Reporter, to help the families of Hasan, Patel and Stroman financially, and his oral history for the Texas After Violence Project includes a section on his relationship with Stroman's family.
His story is the subject of The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas, by the journalist Anand Giridharadas, published by W. W. Norton in 2014 and reviewed by Publishers Weekly in February of that year. The review described Stroman's upbringing as chaotic, spoke of his sense of lost status as a white man, and presented Bhuiyan as the book's more iconic "true American." Salon's reviewer wrote that the book examines Stroman's crime, its aftermath and the lives of Stroman's family.
The case also raised a question about the role of victims in capital cases. Bhuiyan and the families of Hasan and Patel argued that the prosecutor never consulted them about seeking the death penalty, which they said violated their rights under article 56.02 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. Perry's legal team responded that the right was "essentially symbolic," according to the SMU Daily Campus. The Austin Chronicle's Michael King saw in the case an argument about whether "victims' rights" in capital cases really meant the right to vengeance.
The sister. Stroman said he lost a sister at the World Trade Center, and the claim appears in most accounts of his motive. Prosecutors said that court documents showed no firm evidence she existed. The Dallas Observer called the claim unverified, and the Texas Tribune and the Advocate described her as a half-sister.
The Aryan Brotherhood. Court documents said Stroman described himself as a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. He later denied being a white supremacist, pointing to his Hispanic wife. Whether he belonged to the gang is not on record beyond his own statement.
The ninth crime. A fellow inmate testified that Stroman called the Hasan killing his ninth crime of this kind. The charges on record cover three attacks, and the claim remains unverified.
The dates. The date of Stroman's arrest, October 4 or 5, 2001, differs between wire copy and the Morning News. The date of the guilty verdict is April 2 or April 4, 2002 depending on the court record.
The motive and the charge. Stroman said he acted as retaliation for September 11. The charge on which he was tried was not a hate crime, but capital murder in the course of a robbery. The robbery element was the legal basis for the death sentence; the hatred behind the killings appears in the prosecutors' closing statements ("pure hatred") and in the Fifth Circuit's description of his stated purpose.
October 13, 1969: Mark Anthony Stroman is born, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
1981 and 1983: Juvenile police reports later read at his trial concern a robbery-type incident and unauthorized use of a vehicle.
1991: Paroled from a Dallas County sentence.
September 11, 2001: Attacks on New York and Washington.
September 15, 2001: Waqar Hasan is killed in Dallas.
September 21, 2001: Rais Bhuiyan is attacked in Dallas and survives.
October 4, 2001: Vasudev Patel is killed during an attempted robbery in Mesquite.
October 5, 2001: Mesquite police arrest Stroman, according to the Dallas Morning News; he confesses to all three attacks.
November 15, 2001: Stroman is charged with capital murder in the Patel killing.
April 2002: A Dallas County jury convicts him of capital murder and he is sentenced to death; the Texas Department of Criminal Justice receives him on April 5.
November 13, 2003: Files his first state habeas application.
November 19, 2003: The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirms the conviction and sentence.
June 28, 2004: The U.S. Supreme Court denies review of the direct appeal.
July 27, 2005: The Court of Criminal Appeals denies state habeas relief.
July 24, 2006: Files a federal habeas petition.
September 28, 2009: Chief Judge Sidney Fitzwater denies the petition.
December 27, 2010: The Fifth Circuit refuses a certificate of appealability.
May 19, 2011: Bhuiyan says he will ask for a stay of the execution.
June 27, 2011: The U.S. Supreme Court denies certiorari.
June 28, 2011: Amnesty International issues an urgent action asking for commutation.
July 12 and 14, 2011: Stroman files a subsequent state application and the Court of Criminal Appeals dismisses it. Bhuiyan's lawsuit against Governor Perry and other officials is reported.
July 18, 2011: A Travis County judge sends Bhuiyan's lawsuit to federal court.
July 20, 2011: Federal court, Fifth Circuit, Court of Criminal Appeals and U.S. Supreme Court reject the last requests; Stroman is executed and pronounced dead at 8:53 p.m. in Huntsville.
2014: The True American, Anand Giridharadas's book on Stroman and Bhuiyan, is published.