The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas by Anand Giridharadas Page A

security seemed to exhale their boredom in the face of every entrant and workers in the cafeteria mumbled during one break about the next break and the clerks looked up only after you’d been talking awhile. In the basement, men in sleeveless undershirts sat waiting for a chapter of their record to be handed over, and they gave the impression of being regulars. On another floor, a woman sat before a receptionist, trying to explain that the complaint she wanted to make involved domestic violence and that she preferred to speak in private. On floor after floor, families sat hoping to learn the fate of fathers and brothers and sons and, on some occasions, of mothers and sisters and daughters. They moved through a building whose bones were steadily weakening with time: the local press called its elevators shaky and “cantankerous,” disparaged its bathrooms foremitting sewer smells, its floors for their long cracks, its thermostat system for making it icy in some courtrooms while steamy in others.
    Judge Wade, in the 292nd District courtroom, had the advantage of having worked every side of a criminal case. Once an officer and instructor pilot in the U.S. Air Force, he had worked as a trial lawyer after law school; then as a prosecutor, conducting a hundred jury trials; then as a criminal defense attorney; and, finally, since 1995, as a judge. Though his obligations in this case were potentially daunting, he gave Stroman a good feeling. Something about Wade fostered trust in an anxious defendant.
    On that first day of the trial, many worlds collided. Rais Bhuiyan was hiding from Stroman’s associates in that small office and avoiding the bathroom. The widows of Hasan and Patel were in the courtroom. Stroman was of course there. Tena, his estranged wife, and three of his four children were there. Tom Boston was there.
    The trial they had come to witness would boil down to one overwhelming question: should Mark Stroman continue living? It had become the focal question by a strange, improbable path.
    In the months between the shootings and the trial, Mark Stroman had widely advertised himself to the world as a hate criminal. There was a strange television interview he gave in February, by telephone from jail, in which he admitted to the shootings and reportedly justified them: “We’re at war. I did what I had to do. I did it to retaliate against those who retaliated against us.” That month, while being transferred between units at the Lew Sterrett county jail, Stroman was written up for saying to a guard, “You’d think it was illegal to kill Arabs around here.” He had obviously mistaken his captor for a sympathizer. When the guard informed him that, yes, it is illegal, Stroman retorted, “If you had loved ones they killed, you’d kill ’em, too.”
    In the letters he wrote from prison, he was equally blunt—and not merely about Arabs. “I don’t know how much longer I can stand all these fuckin ‘niggers,’ ” he wrote to a friend soon after arriving.Beneath these words, he drew a Confederate flag and scrawled “Forever free!!!” In another letter, a new living arrangement seemed to bring relief: “I got a new cellie, he is ‘white.’ That’s good, but he beat some fag to death with a fuckin hammer, only 35 times in the head. Damn! I thought I had a few issues :) He don’t like nager’s at all, so now there are 3 of us in for murder, all white. The nager’s are worried about us :) Hell I’m even worried about us. Haha.” At times he traded in jokes he enjoyed: “What’s the difference between a dead niger in the road or a dead dog in the road: dead dog gots skid marks in front of it.”
    As during his earlier stints in prison, Stroman’s whiteness became even more salient to him in that setting. The way he saw it, to be white in a Texas prison was, in an inversion of the usual rules, to be a victim from the start. Mark, like many of his buddies who had done time, was obsessed by visions of how