Killer taken off death row, 35 years later
Defense attorney Benjamin Wolff wept in court as he described the harrowing condition he found death row inmate Syed Rabbani in when he took over his decades-old appeal.
Wolff could hear Rabbani “moaning in agony to no one in particular” when he entered his dark, solitary cell at the Estelle Unit’s hospital wing. And then they turned on the lights. Rabbani had soiled bed sheets and a soiled diaper. Mold surrounded his toilet.
He was unable to move and had been unable to care for himself, said Wolff, a public defender for the state’s Office of Capital and Forensic Writs.
“He’s confined to a prison bed in the most disgusting prison room I’ve ever seen,” he continued. “I’ve been in and out of prisons for 21⁄2 decades. This is the worst type of incarceration I’ve ever seen.”
A prosecutor passed him tissues. The lawyer on Tuesday divulged the detailed account of Rabbani’s mental and physical health to Judge Lori Chambers Gray as she considered the next step for the Bangladesh native. On Monday night, Harris County prosecutors announced they would no longer seek the death penalty against the 58-year-old man, court records show.
The judge said she would consider whether to recommend parole in his case.
Rabbani was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to die for the shooting death of Mohammed Jakir Hasan, 21, a former roommate and a Houston convenience store clerk. He professed his innocence at trial and told the court he wanted to be executed within months, rather than years.
“I don’t want to spend years on death row,” Rabbani said at the time.
In recent months, an appellate court ordered that Rabbani receive a new punishment phase of his trial because the prior judge failed to instruct the jury to consider mitigating evidence that was favorable to the defendant. A trial would no longer be needed after Joshua Reiss, chief of the Post-Conviction Writs Division, announced in the late night filing that his office would seek a life sentence for Rabbani, rather than death, based on the serious mental health and physical issues affecting him.
Lawyers on both sides agreed that Rabbani’s appeal had been ignored for years by those tasked to represent him.
“I want him off death row today,” Reiss told the judge. “Cutting to the chase, there was a due process disaster. The ball was dropped in numerous places. Mr. Rabbani was abandoned by his attorneys.”
Wolff, who started to represent Rabbani this year, told the judge that the defendant’s appeals were lost in the legal system for decades as his case passed from attorney to attorney. With the help of a lawyer, Dick Wheelan, Rabbani sought relief in 1994, a procedural catalyst that prompted several court-appointed psychiatric experts to evaluate the defendant. One of the experts deemed Rabbani incompetent to be executed but no action was taken from prosecutors, the court or his legal team, records show.
Wheelan died in 2008, with
Wolff finding no indication that the attorney still considered himself Rabbani’s lawyer at the time of his death. Another lawyer, Staci Biggar, was appointed two years later but she took no action either, according to court documents.
“There is no indication that she even knew she was Mr. Rabbani’s lawyer or even took any action of his behalf as a lawyer might,” Wolff said in court documents. Biggar did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
As Rabbani’s case languished, he sent letters to court officials claiming that “KGB espionage” led to his incarceration. His medical records made note of schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.
Wolff has asked that Rabbani be taken out of state custody and put into hospice care — a request that Gray said she would consider. Members of Rabbani’s family have offered to take him in in Bangladesh should he be released, the attorney said.