That's the title of Patricia Kilday Hart's commentary in today's Houston Chronicle, and it starts our roundup of coverage of Rail Bhuiyan's campaign for a commutation of his attacker's death sentence.
Looking at Rais Bhuiyan today, you'd never guess that 10 years ago, a meth-fueled, hate-filled bigot with a twisted sense of patriotism and a fondness for swastika tattoos pointed a shotgun at his face from four feet away and fired.
Vengeance for 9/11, the shooter, Mark Stroman, would later brag to Dallas police.
Today, you'd never know that Stroman robbed Bhuiyan of the vision in his right eye. Or that, a decade after this senseless act, more than 35 shotgun pellets still lurk in Bhuiyan's face and head.
Bhuiyan, a handsome high-tech specialist for an online travel company, bears no outward scars from Stroman's rampage, which claimed the lives of two Middle-Eastern-looking store clerks in the Dallas area in the weeks after the Twin Towers in Manhattan fell. More remarkably, he apparently bears few inward wounds, either. He's a proud American (earning his citizenship last year), devoted son (he speaks often with his parents back in Bangladesh) and practicing Muslim.
What's his secret? How does a critically injured 26-year-old store clerk recover physically from a murderous rage, and not succumb emotionally to the racist hate that motivated it?
"Forgiveness," he says in his impeccable English.
It's a word that Bhuiyan used often in explaining why, last week, he appealed to a Travis County district court to stop the execution of Stroman, scheduled for Wednesday. In the lawsuit, he begs Gov. Rick Perry and the Board of Pardons and Paroles to reduce Stroman's death sentence — handed down by a Dallas County judge for the shooting death of Mesquite store clerk Vasudev Patel - to life without parole.
He says he learned the healing power of forgiveness from his parents, and his faith.
"All of the religions teach compassion, forgiveness, healing and tolerance," Bhuiyan said, citing in particular a verse from the biblical book of Matthew: "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy."
Rais Bhuiyan's website is World Without Hate.
Samian Quazi writes, "Spare Stroman for my identity," for the Daily Texan.
I felt struck by Bhuiyan’s story because it encapsulates the pain and idealism so familiar to Bengali immigrants in America. As a one year-old baby, I moved with my family to Texas from Bangladesh. While some Bengali immigrants from India and Bangladesh can comfortably settle into white-collar occupations, many others are relegated to dangerous, arduous jobs such as taxicab drivers and gas station clerks.
Like Bhuiyan, my father first encountered America with all of its hardships and few of its glories. We didn’t have a mattress at the time, so we slept on the carpet of our one-bedroom apartment. After working two full-time jobs (one hauling luggage in a hotel, the other cooking at a Denny’s in Houston,) Dad found a new job in a gas station. The hours were long and he often only came home for only three or four hours of sleep, but I don’t look back on those times with misery. I was too young then.
But one of my earliest memories was around age four, when I visited my father outside Memorial Hermann Hospital in 1993. That year, gunshot wounds from an armed robbery at Dad’s gas station had left him in a wheelchair for more than a month. His absence felt like a hollowed-out emptiness, a sense that what once was is what should be and that anything else was loneliness.
Standing outside that hospital with mom and dad in his wheelchair and hospital gown in a pitch-dark night during visiting hours, I felt complete. It felt reassuring to be next to the man with the same hair as me, the “big version” of myself. I was impatient for him to come home already, and I had no feeling (much less animosity) toward the robber. Being next to my father then was the only time in my life I felt hopelessly, undeniably secure.
At Huffington Post, Tanya Greene posts, "Rais Bhuiyan: Another Irrelevant Victim?" She is Advocacy and Policy Counsel of the ACLU.
The State of Texas does not hesitate to use crime victims to pressure decision makers to convict, sentence to death and carry out executions. Why only then?
In this case, we have a survivor of a vicious attempted homicide who has forgiven his would-be killer and who wants to take advantage of the state's own offering of victim-offender services to exchange ideas and heal wounds. We have a survivor who firmly believes that the man the state seeks to execute is no longer the same man who shot him because he looks like the 9/11 hijackers.
Thus far, the State of Texas has not responded to Bhuiyan's requests to meet with Stroman. Contact Texas Gov. Rick Perry and urge him to honor Bhuiyan's request to grant clemency to Stroman to live out the rest of his life in prison, and to allow for continued victim-offender understanding and healing.
From Australia, human rights lawyer Elizabeth O'Shea writes the OpEd, "Unspeakable wrongness of death penalty," for the Age.
THE death penalty is not something Australians often turn their minds to, except when one of our citizens faces execution overseas. But over the last week, a story has been unfolding in the US and Europe that is worth telling. Mark Stroman is on death row in Texas after being found guilty of murder and is to be executed tomorrow. Stroman's story and that of his victim, Rais Bhuiyan, is one replete with both horror and hope. Above all, it exemplifies the dignity of forgiveness.
I have worked with prisoners on death row with Reprieve, an organisation opposed to the death penalty. I learnt two important things from my experience. The first is that many death row inmates have unbearably sad stories to tell. Most have a history of child abuse, neglect and poverty. The cycle of violence that they are born into repeats itself. The criminal justice system has plenty of time for victims, until they become perpetrators.
Earlier coverage begins at the link.
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