It was the moans of agony that first caught Ben Wolff’s attention.
As Wolff, a defense lawyer and the director of the Texas Office of Forensic and Capital Writs, followed a jailer down a Huntsville prison corridor, he knew that his new client, Syed Rabbani, was in poor physical condition. Rabbani, then 57, was serving a death sentence for a 1987 murder, and was reported to be in bad health.
But Wolff wasn’t prepared for the groans that wafted from Rabbani’s cell as the jailer jangled his keys. He wasn’t prepared for what greeted him as the jailer flipped the light switch, illuminating the concrete cell in a fluorescent glow.
There, Wolff found Rabbani bedridden in what he later called “the most disgusting prison circumstance” he’d seen in his 25-year career, with soiled bed pads littering the floor, feces smeared across the wall and furry mold growing atop an orange liquid in the toilet.
Ben Wolff, attorney for Syed Rabbani, listens to Judge Lori Chambers Gray during a court hearing at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023, in Houston. Rabbani, who was issued the death sentence in 1988, will be officially resentenced to life with the possibility of parole after having his death row sentence overturned. (Antranik Tavitian / Houston Landing)
Rabbani’s medical condition was equally disturbing. Over the years, he became blinded by cataracts, rendered nearly immobile and barely able to communicate by a stroke. When Wolff met him, all Rabbani could do to comfort himself was tug a rigid blanket over his face.
“I’ll never forget the first time I saw Mr. Rabbani,” Wolff said at a court hearing in November. He became emotional as he spoke, forced to pause to collect himself. “It was horrifying – truly horrifying.”
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In 1988, when Syed Rabbani began serving his death sentence, he was a physically healthy 23-year-old – slight, round-faced, with jet-black hair and a hesitant smile. Today, he is in a near-vegetative state, crippled by a variety of illnesses, including severe schizophrenia. In the years between, his advocates say, the system failed Rabbani. He was forgotten over and over again: by the courts, by his defense attorneys, and even by the prison staff charged with his care.
“This case says nothing good about the way we treat the human beings in our criminal justice system,” Robin Maher, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, said in an email. “That a man so vulnerable could be simply forgotten is just inexcusable.”
Rabbani’s legal appeal challenging his death sentence, which would ultimately prove successful, languished in the Harris County courts for decades. His defense attorneys neglected to pursue it, effectively abandoning Rabbani and leaving him unrepresented for years. Meanwhile, prosecutors remained aware of the appeal but appear to have set it aside indefinitely.
Law enforcement photographs, one taken in the late 1980s and the other taken in 2022, show Syed Rabbani’s deterioration during his decades serving an unconstitutional death sentence. Rabbani's lawyers allege he suffered medical neglect while serving the sentence.
At the same time, Rabbani’s new lawyers allege he suffered medical neglect while serving the unconstitutional death sentence.Together, these failures have left Rabbani as Wolff found him in spring 2023 – severely disabled, deeply mentally ill and unable to stand or even articulate full sentences. He has, Wolff wrote in his letter to the district court judge, “deteriorated past the point of possible recovery.”
In an email to the Houston Landing on Wednesday, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice disputed Wolff’s allegations about Rabbani’s living conditions and declined to comment on Rabbani’s care specifically.
“All inmates have access to comprehensive health care, including mental health care,” Amanda Hernandez, director of communications for TDCJ, said in an email. “Both security and nursing staff attend to inmates on a regular basis.”
Rabbani’s case is not isolated.
His appeal was just one of dozens to be lost in the Harris County courts between 1994 and 2013, an apparent system failure that left about 100 defendants in legal limbo for years, sometimes decades.
The appeals contested convictions on charges ranging from felony theft to capital murder; by the time they were rediscovered in 2022, many defendants had served the entire prison sentence at issue, while others, like Rabbani, remained incarcerated as their potentially winning arguments gathered dust.
Rabbani saw his decades-old appeal granted in September by Texas’ highest criminal court, which overturned his death sentence as unconstitutional because the judge failed to properly instruct jurors about taking important factors into consideration during the sentencing phase of his 1988 trial. The appeal, which had remained pending for nearly 30 years, left Rabbani serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole, for which he is now eligible on the basis of time served.
And yet his future remains uncertain. Earlier this month, a Harris County district court judge declined to recommend parole or a transfer to hospice for Rabbani, writing that such decisions were within the purview of “the executive branch (or) the Board of Pardons and Paroles.”
For now, then, Rabbani remains in the Estelle prison unit in Huntsville, in a medical condition that led prison staff to repeatedly but unsuccessfully recommend he be transferred to hospice.
“This case is a stain on the soul of the criminal legal system,” said Wolff at Rabbani’s resentencing hearing earlier this month. “This case has not only harmed Mr. Rabbani, it’s harmed all of us. It was a court failure, a system failure – and a moral failure.”
Syed Rabbani, who first came to the United States from his native Bangladesh to attend university, was 23 years old when a Harris County jury convicted him of capital murder in 1988. Though Rabbani maintained his innocence throughout the trial, the jury found him guilty of fatally shooting Mohammed Jakir Hasan, a fellow Bangladeshi immigrant who worked as a clerk at a Quick-n-Easy convenience store. The sentence was upheld on direct appeal, with an execution date set in 1993.
“This man is violent,” said Harris County prosecutor Joan Campbell during Rabbani’s sentencing hearing, according to a contemporary article published in the Houston Chronicle. “He even likes to hear guns go off. Is there a probability this man will commit acts of violence in the future? You betcha. He’s scary. He likes to kill.”
The execution was stayed, however, when Rabbani’s new defense counsel, pro bono lawyer Dick Wheelan, filed a different type of appeal in 1994 – a writ of habeas corpus, which challenges unlawful incarceration. Months later, a team of Harris County psychiatrists diagnosed Rabbani with “a mental illness of psychotic proportions” following a motion by Wheelan.
What happened next, Rabbani’s current lawyers allege, was nothing short of abandonment.
As he continued to serve the death sentence that would be later declared unconstitutional, Rabbani was effectively forgotten by his defense lawyers, with his case set aside by the prosecutor’s office that had sent him to death row.
Wheelan’s 1994 motion to have Rabbani’s psychological competency evaluated by a panel of psychiatrists was the last legal action taken by a defense lawyer on Rabbani’s behalf until 2022, when his appeal was rediscovered during efforts to reduce the backlog in the Harris County courts. After that motion nearly three decades ago, Wheelan submitted no further filings in Rabbani’s case. Neither did Staci Biggar, Rabbani’s next defense lawyer, who was appointed by the court in 2010 two years after Wheelan’s death – two years during which Rabbani, a death penalty inmate, lacked counsel.
Biggar, who did not respond to the Landing’s request for comment, also lacked the qualifications to represent death penalty defendants, according to a memorandum Wolff wrote to the Court of Criminal Appeals in 2022. In effect, Rabbani was left without legal representation, and would remain so for the next 12 years.
“It was a grave injustice that Mr. Rabbani was sentenced to death and left without counsel to represent his interests for so many years,” Maher said.
Harris County prosecutors also allowed Rabbani’s appeal to languish without reply.
In 2012, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office told the Court of Criminal Appeals that it had not responded to Rabbani’s filing because he was incompetent to face execution. The state had decided to delay further litigation because of Rabbani’s mental illness – even though neither Rabbani nor his legal counsel had ever formally agreed to such an arrangement, and even though the delay meant Rabbani would continue serving a death sentence indefinitely.
(Above) Joshua Reiss, a division chief with the Harris County District Attorney's Office, hands Judge Lori Chambers Gray a copy of Syed Rabbani’s original trail transcript during a hearing for Rabbani at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023, in Houston. (Below) Joshua Reiss, a division chief with the Harris County District Attorney's Office, tells Judge Lori Chambers Gray that the state will not be pursuing the death penalty during a hearing for Syed Rabbani at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023, in Houston. Rabbani was issued the death sentence in 1988 after a jury found Rabbani guilty of killing a fellow Bangladeshi immigrant, 28-year-old Mohammed Hasan, at a Houston convenience store. (Antranik Tavitian / Houston Landing)
“Unquestionably, we were aware,” said Joshua Reiss, Post-Conviction Writ Division chief at the Harris County district attorney’s office. “But the responsibility for moving the (appeal) forward was the responsibility of (Rabbani’s) attorney if he had a righteous claim. Which he did.”
Reiss was not responsible for Rabbani’s case in 2012. When asked whether it is currently the district attorney’s office’s policy to set aside appeals when the defendant is incompetent to face execution, Reiss said, “In any case where a writ has been filed, and I believe that an individual’s due process rights have been violated, I’m going to acknowledge that, full stop.”
The lack of action on the part of defense lawyers and prosecutors meant that Rabbani would continue serving an unconstitutional death sentence, which he did from the time his appeal was filed in 1994 until September of this year. In the meantime, he deteriorated physically as well as mentally.
Even as he remained in limbo in the criminal legal system, however, Rabbani fought back using the only means available to him – the civil courts.
Beginning in 1994, Rabbani filed a series of increasingly bizarre civil rights lawsuits on his own behalf. In some, he sued public figures, like then-Harris County District Attorney Johnny Holmes; in others, he filed against entities like “Brutal Country, U.S.A.” and “all life forms in all galaxies.”
All his lawsuits were dismissed, and a federal judge finally barred Rabbani from filing any further litigation in 2003. In his decision, the judge cited the history of dismissals and scolded Rabbani for his “continued abuse of the court system” – even as his criminal appeal lay dormant and forgotten.
Like the lawsuits, Rabbani wrote letters to his trial court judge, Doug Shaver, that also showed signs of progressively worsening mental illness. In the letters, Rabbani maintained his innocence and begged for release, but his reasoning seemed increasingly delusional. In 1993, he told Shaver he was “CIA and diplomat from Bangladesh.” Then, in 1999, he described himself as “divine eternal president,” followed by a second letter stating “HELLFIRE MUST BE DESTROYED.”
TDCJ prison staff echoed the Harris County psychiatrists’ conclusions with diagnoses of schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. He was medicated for these conditions – but not for a variety of other problems indicated in his medical files. Records show Rabbani has exhibited various symptoms of diabetes for years, including impaired vision and dramatic fluctuations in his blood sugar levels. Since 2018, Rabbani has been alternately diagnosed with abnormally high and abnormally low blood sugar. Still, TDCJ medical staff do not appear to have tested him for an underlying condition that would cause the oscillation.
Records also indicate a history of seizures dating at least to 2017. That year, he fell and hit his head. Doctors identified the episode as a seizure, but did not provide care for an epileptic condition. In fact, Rabbani had reported experiencing seizures in 2011 and told doctors he had suffered from the problem for a decade. TDCJ medical staff do not appear to have taken any action in response to his complaint.
For Rabbani’s lawyers, the lack of follow-through and care on these issues is tantamount to neglect, resulting in a catastrophe in February 2022.
That month, Rabbani was discovered unresponsive in his cell with hypothermia, a dangerously low body temperature. In fact, this was Rabbani’s second episode of hypothermia, but on this occasion, he experienced a confluence of other medical crises, including seizures, acute pancreatitis, a heart attack and a stroke. It is unclear which of these conditions triggered the episode.
Ultimately, Rabbani was left brain-damaged, with severely impaired mobility and limited means of communication. His lawyers believe his current condition could have been prevented had prison staff provided the care Rabbani required.
“TDCJ staff ignored medical warning signs and essentially left Mr. Rabbani to rot in his cell,” Wolff wrote in his letter to the district court earlier this month.
After the crisis in February 2022, prison staff recommended Rabbani be transferred to hospice to receive the medical care his condition required. The recommendations were denied by a supervisor, however, who cited Rabbani’s death sentence – the same sentence later declared unconstitutional.
Over the years, Rabbani has remained an isolated figure. He lost contact with his family in Bangladesh following the death of his father in 1995, and when his current legal team asked whether he had any friends when they visited him in the spring of 2023, he told them his “best friend” was Johnny Holmes – the former Harris County district attorney whose office sent Rabbani to death row.
A moment of serendipity, however, provided a glimmer of hope. In September, Rabbani’s half-brother, a law student in Bangladesh, happened upon the Landing’s coverage of the case while scouring the internet for information on his long-lost sibling. In an emotional court hearing earlier this month, Wolff called the connection “kismet,” or fate, and cited the Landing’s role in reestablishing the connection.
The half-brother, Syed Fasaini, 34, offered to care for Rabbani should he be paroled and deported back to Bangladesh. In an interview, Fasaini maintained his brother’s innocence, calling the conviction “a set up,” and lamented Rabbani’s long incarceration.
“35 years in prison is too much punishment,” said Fasaini.
Wolff agrees.
“Texas has lost the moral authority to keep (Rabbani) confined,” he said. In an interview, he argued that Rabbani should be paroled because his severe impairments have eliminated any retributive or public safety benefit to continued incarceration.
“What’s confinement without purpose?” Wolff asked. “What’s punishment without purpose? It’s torture.”
This article first appeared on Houston Landing and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
