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Texas death row inmates will no longer get their choice of last meals, after the menu request of a man condemned for a notorious hate crime slaying left a bad taste in the mouth of a prominent senator.<\/p>\n
Lawrence Russell Brewer, who was executed on Wednesday, asked for two chicken fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound (450 grams) of barbecue meat, three fajitas, a meat lover’s pizza, a pint of ice-cream and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts.
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Prison officials said Brewer didn’t eat any of it.<\/p>\n
Brewer, a white supremacist gang member, was convicted of chaining James Byrd jnr, 49, to the back of a pick-up truck and dragging him to his death along a bumpy road in 1998.<\/p>\n
Brewer’s dinner request prompted Senator John Whitmire to demand the end of the practice in a letter to Brad Livingston, the executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.<\/p>\n
“It is extremely inappropriate to give a person sentenced to death such a privilege,” Whitmire, who chairs the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, wrote in the letter on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Within hours, Livingston said the senator’s concerns were valid and the practice of allowing death row offenders to choose their final meal was history.<\/p>\n
“Effective immediately, no such accommodations will be made,” Livingston said.<\/p>\n
“They will receive the same meal served to other offenders on the unit.”<\/p>\n
That had been the suggestion from Whitmire, who called the traditional request “ridiculous”.<\/p>\n
“It’s long overdue,” the Houston Democrat told The Associated Press.<\/p>\n
“Mr Byrd didn’t get to choose his last meal. The whole deal is so illogical.”<\/p>\n
Whitmire warned in his letter that if the “last meal of choice” practice was not stopped immediately, he would seek a state statute to end it when congress convened in the next legislative session.<\/p>\n
It was not immediately clear whether other states had made similar moves.<\/p>\n
Some limit the final meal cost: Florida’s maximum is $US40, according to the Department of Corrections website, with food to be purchased locally.<\/p>\n
Others, such as Texas, which never had a designated dollar limit, mandate that meals be prison-made.<\/p>\n
Some states do not acknowledge final meals, and others will disclose the information only if the inmate agrees, said K William Hayes, a Florida-based death penalty historian.<\/p>\n
Some states require the meal within a specific time period, allow multiple “final” meals, restrict it to one or impose “a vast number of conditions”, he said.<\/p>\n
Since Texas resumed carrying out executions in 1982, the state correction agency’s practice has been to fill a condemned inmate’s request as long as the items, or food similar to what was requested, were readily available from the prison kitchen supplies.<\/p>\n
While extensive, Brewer’s request was far from the largest or most bizarre among the 475 Texas inmates put to death.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, prisoner Cleve Foster’s request included two fried chickens, French fries and a five-gallon (19-litre) bucket of peaches.<\/p>\n
He received a reprieve from the US Supreme Court but none of his requested meal. He was on his way back to death row, at a prison about 70 kilometres east of Huntsville, at the time when his feast would have been served.<\/p>\n
Last week, inmate Steven Woods’s request included two pounds (one kilogram) of bacon, a large four-meat pizza, four fried chicken breasts, two drinks each of Mountain Dew, Pepsi, root beer and sweet tea, two pints (one litre) of ice-cream, five chicken fried steaks, two hamburgers with bacon, fries and a dozen garlic bread sticks with marinara on the side. Two hours later, he was executed.<\/p>\n
Years ago, a Texas inmate even requested dirt for his final meal.<\/p>\n
Until 2003, the Texas prison system listed final meals of each prisoner as part of its death row website.<\/p>\n
That stopped at 313 final meals after officials said they received complaints from people who found it offensive.<\/p>\n
A former inmate cook who made the last meals for prisoners at the Huntsville Unit, where Texas executions are carried out, wrote a cookbook several years ago after he was released.<\/p>\n
Among his recipes were Gallows Gravy, Rice Rigor Mortis and Old Sparky’s Genuine Convict Chili, a nod to the electric chair that once served as the execution method. The book was called Meals to Die For.<\/p>\n
Photo: AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Texas death row inmates will no longer get their choice of last meals, after the menu request of a man condemned for a notorious hate crime slaying left a bad taste in the mouth of a prominent senator. Lawrence Russell Brewer, who was executed on Wednesday, asked for two chicken fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=625"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":640,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/625\/revisions\/640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ubune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}