Today’s story of Tennessee’s botched execution of Christa Pike three decades after the murder she committed as a teenager reminded me of this piece I wrote for TIME back in 2000 on America’s weird fascination with learning the final-meal requests of condemned prisoners — and what we learn from it about capital punishment. (Pike, btw, had declined to request a specific meal — though if she had, it’s contents would have been dutifully reported).
Indeed, press reports of a sample of Tennessee executions over the past few years tell us the following:
Robert Glen Coe | April 19, 2000 | Fried catfish, white beans, hush puppies, coleslaw, French fries, pecan pie, and sweet tea.
Sedley Alley | June 28, 2006 | Pizza pockets, ice cream, iced oatmeal cookies, and milk.
Philip Ray Workman | May 9, 2007 | Declined food for himself; asked that a large vegetarian pizza be given to a homeless person in Nashville. Prison authorities declined the request.
Daryl Keith Holton | September 12, 2007 | Declined a special meal; ate the standard meal: riblets on a bun, mixed vegetables, baked beans, white cake with white icing, and iced tea.
Steve Henley | February 4, 2009 | A seafood plate: shrimp, oysters, fried fish, onion rings, and hush puppies.
Billy Ray Irick | August 9, 2018 | A “super deluxe” cheeseburger-and-onion-rings combo, with Pepsi.
Donnie Edward Johnson | May 16, 2019 | Declined a meal and asked supporters instead to donate meals to homeless people.
Stephen Michael West | August 15, 2019 | Philly cheesesteak and French fries.
Leroy Hall Jr. | December 5, 2019 | Philly cheesesteak, two orders of onion rings, a slice of cheesecake, and a Pepsi.
Nicholas Sutton | February 20, 2020 | Fried pork chops, mashed potatoes with gravy, and peach pie with vanilla ice cream.
Byron Lewis Black | August 5, 2025 | Pizza with mushrooms and sausage, doughnuts, and butter-pecan ice cream.
Anthony Darrell Hines | August 2026 | Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn, coleslaw, fries, biscuits, chocolate-chip cake, and sweet tea. Contemporary accounts differ slightly over whether a chicken sandwich was also included. [5][6] |
So, why do these final meal requests form part of media coverage of executions?
From my TIME piece:
Oliver David Cruz, the rapist-murderer executed in Texas Wednesday, chose a south-of-the-border theme for his last supper: spicy beef fajitas, beans and rice, flour tortillas, onions, tomatoes, avocados, a banana split and orange juice.
We know this because, in keeping with a morbid convention in media coverage of executions, the condemned person’s final meal has already been broadcast to the world by the wire services. And soon it will find its way onto what may be the most macabre culinary site on the Web: The Texas Department of Criminal Justices Final Meal Request page (sadly, it was taken down some years ago)
There we learn that Cruz’s choices are somewhat humble measured against the norm. Just two weeks, ago, for example, murderer Juan Soria wanted “chicken, three pieces of fish, burgers, pizza, fruit (grapes, plums, peaches, apples, tangerines), doughnuts, walnuts, chocolate candy bar, plain potato chips, picante sauce, hot sauce, salad with ranch dressing, Coke and Sprite” before going to meet his maker. A month earlier, Jessy San Miguel, who had killed four people execution-style while robbing a Taco Bell, had asked for “Pizza (beef, bacon bits, and multiple types of cheese), 10 quesadillas (5 mozzarella cheese, 5 cheddar cheese), 5 strips of open-flame grilled beef, 5 strips of stir-fried beef, chocolate peanut butter ice cream, sweet tea, double fudge chocolate cake, broccoli and grapes” before he lay down for the last time on that Huntsville gurney.
I can’t deny my own voyeuristic fascination as I scroll down through the choices of men being offered one final moment of the “freedom” to be a consumer. Their choices, as diverse, poignant and sometimes just plain wacky as they are, offer clues to their identities and character. But perhaps that fascination is simply a kind of “desert island discs” game that calls on the reader to consider his or her own menu for a final meal. But even more fascinating than the contents of the site, perhaps, is the decision by the folks down at Huntsville to post this information on the Web.
Governments are not in the habit of going out of their way to satisfy the voyeuristic impulses of a morbidly curious public. Perhaps there’s simply some bureaucratic sense of duty to record the minutiae of a condemned person’s last day on earth. Or perhaps our culture has evolved this ritual of the la carte last meal to sugarcoat what remains a grim act of violence by the state to redress a previous wrong. After all, in some countries, a condemned man’s last meal is whatever the prison kitchen happens to be serving that day, and death is by firing squad rather than the lethal injection ritual that gives the impression of a medical procedure rather than the more visible violence of shooting a man to death.
Where some Islamic cultures have evolved detailed instruction on the taking of life and limb as punishment for various crimes, an American culture that takes its moral reference points from the Old Testament and the New is stuck with the challenge of trying, if indeed this is possible, of finding morally agreeable rituals for executing offenders. And it’s not easy. The Last Meal Requests page records numerous instances of requests for a final cigarette. And these, the site notes, are denied in accordance with department policy. Could it be that the policy is designed to protect the condemned men’s health? It could simply be based on the judgment that a cigarette is a pleasure that should be denied a man who has committed crimes ugly enough to warrant execution. But then why allow the same man the pleasure of choosing his last meal, as opposed to simply giving him whatever the prison kitchen was serving that day?
There’s no correct answer, of course. Killing people is a morally messy business. Whether we allow a man carte blanche with junk food menus and then have a medic administer a lethal injection, or we simply serve him that day’s fried chicken and then shoot him in the head, the act is, in essence, the same. The difference, in the end, may have less to do with the condemned man’s perception than it does with the way his executioners — and the society that orders them to kill its capital convicts — experience his death.
Face it, half of America is still stuck in the early 19th Century, and if, like Pete Hegseth, it calls itself Christian, it is deluding itself. State-sanctioned murder is hardly a Christian act, even if the victim is herself a murderer. What kind of person relishes killing another human being? I think we know the answer to that. Everyone knows that, except for the Country Music industry. Tennessee is not exactly a forward-looking state. As far as moral and intellectual development goes, it's still caught somewhere between the 19th and 18th centuries. The botched execution, murder, termination with extreme prejudice, or whatever you want to call it, of Christa Pike, more than 30 years after her crime, is an embarrassment for the state's outgoing governor, but it is an even greater embarrassment for the U.S. Supreme Court, which overruled the court in Tennessee that had recommended taking enough time to find out what was really going on. Independently of the Pike affair, the U.S. Supreme Court appears to have abandoned any respect for the rule of law, and instead dedicated itself to a quick advancement of MAGA barbarism while a Republican majority still enables it to dodge common sense.
Thank you for this article - I too would be fascinated to see the full list of last meals.
I find the refusal to allow the option of making one’s final act one of generosity by giving the last meal to the homeless further confirmation of how little the criminal “ justice” system cares for redemption. And the denial of a cigarette and/or a stiff drink instead - likely all most death row prisoners truly desire - which would be a lot cheaper for the State than a meal speaks for itself.
But for me the horror! the horror! of the faux sanitisation of the barbarism of capital punishment is in the fact that they still swab the injection spot with antiseptic before injecting the lethal dose.