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Alberto Martínez /AMERICAN-STATESMAN.
It was almost 8 p.m. Wednesday when Rais Bhuiyan finally got a chance to tell a judge why his attacker's execution, also scheduled for Wednesday evening, should be delayed so he could meet the man who tried to kill him.
"I would love him to explain, why? How?" said Bhuiyan, who was shot in the face by Mark Stroman during a crime spree in 2001 that left two of Stroman's other Dallas-area victims dead.
"When he shot me, I was bleeding," Bhuiyan said, crying. "What was going through his mind? Did he ever think about his kid? I'm somebody's kid as well."
Bhuiyan's poignant testimony was cut short when visiting state District Judge Joe Hart learned that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had issued an order prohibiting him from continuing.
The U.S. Supreme Court refused Stroman's appeals, and he was put to death about 9 p.m.
"I would say that we just repealed the victims' rights act in Texas," said Bhuiyan's lawyer, Khurrum Wahid of Florida.
Bhuiyan, a 37-year-old from Bangladesh who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, was working as a convenience store clerk in Dallas in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when he was shot by Stroman, who according to testimony at his trial was a white supremacist who said he was out for revenge. Stroman has said his sister died in the attacks, but prosecutors have said there is no proof of that.
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