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"And For Your Last Meal, You'll Have A Choice Between The Fried Baloney Sandwich, And The Spam Enchilada."

Sep 23, 2011
By .
Politics & Current Events

Citing a complaint from State Senator John Whitmire (D., Harris County), the Texas Department of Corrections has announced it will stop offering condemned inmates the "inappropriate" luxury of choosing their last meal.

 

Prison officials halted the practice Thursday after a state senator complained about the last meal served to Lawrence Russell Brewer, a white supremacist who was executed on Wednesday for chaining a black man, James Byrd Jr., 49, to the back of his pickup truck and dragging him down a bumpy country road to his death a decade ago.

Brewer requested two chicken fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat lover's pizza, a pint of ice cream and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts. Prison officials said Brewer didn't eat any of it.

I'll bet they had a Texas-sized feast in the prison guards' break room that night.

In its way Whitmire's complaint makes sense.  It does appear that some condemned men as a final, and pathetic, blow against the State that's about to terminate their lives, order ridiculously large and varied meals they have no intention of eating.  So perhaps it makes sense, from a petty penny-pincher's perspective, to end such nonsense.  "You'll have corned beef hash, and like it!"

But even in a State which fervently accepts the idea that lethal injection is an appropriate penalty for murder, there's something especially cruel and unusual in Whitmire's demand that the old custom, which dates back to Roman times, be abolished even for inmates who don't abuse the "privilege" of a last meal.   The death penalty is supposed to be civilization's response to those who commit the ultimate crime, and it's supposed to be carried out in a humane fashion.  I'm not about to say that by making execution harder than it already is, by denying the condemned man even this little luxury, we show ourselves to be just as cruel as the murderer.  We simply show ourselves to be petty, and mean.

John Whitmire is one mean son of a bitch.

Last 5 posts by Patrick Non-White

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20 Comments

  1. Ken  •  Sep 23, 2011 @9:19 am

    Politicians will never lose many votes by shitting on convicts — or even on those accused of crimes.

  2. Al  •  Sep 23, 2011 @9:20 am

    You didn't think Texas was just going take Georgia upstaging them without a fight, did you?

  3. David  •  Sep 23, 2011 @9:31 am

    Politicians will never lose many votes by shitting on those acquitted of crimes, even.

  4. Dwight Brown  •  Sep 23, 2011 @10:24 am

    As a side note, for what it may be worth, Senator Whitmire was at the center of another issue about three years ago, when he started getting calls from an inmate on Death Row who was using a contraband cell phone.

    Here's an article from USA Today about the incident.

    I'm not defending Whitmire's actions in this case. I'm with Patrick and think he made a mountain out of something that wasn't even a molehill. But I do think this might explain him being a mean SOB.

  5. tomd  •  Sep 23, 2011 @10:34 am

    Isn't having someone to be cruel to the whole point of the exercise? When those pathetic Tea Partiers cheered the cold-blooded killings of hundreds of people, weren't they cheering the fact that there are a few poor bastards who are lower on the ladder than they? If you're treating the condemned with respect, then the exercise isn't going to deliver the satisfaction. They want there to clearly be people between the bottom of the barrel and themselves, and they want to poke them in the eye with a stick while they're at it.

    Speaking of Rome, good thing there is no parallel whatsoever between declining Imperial Rome with its gladiators and public executions (and it's inevitable fall), and contemporary Texas rushing its economy to the bottom and its fervent pace of well publicized executions… Nope, no similarities at all. Nothing to see here… Move along…

  6. eddie  •  Sep 23, 2011 @10:45 am

    Assuming one accepts the propriety of the state executing criminals at all and assuming that the person to be executed is actually guilty of a heinous crime and is deserving of the death penalty – all of which are pretty damn presumptuous assumptions – I see no reason to treat them any differently than any other prisoner (apart from killing them, that is) nor to treat their last day as anything more special than any of their days before.

  7. Clark  •  Sep 23, 2011 @11:51 am

    I'm torn on this.

    In the abstract, yes, this sounds terribly mean spirited.

    However, when I read about cases like this one where two thugs followed a man and his wife home, tied him up in the basement, raped and murdered his wife, raped his older daughter, raped his 11 year old daughter, then poured gasoline over her and burned her alive (and burned the house down around them, thus killing them), I think "does it really lesson us, as human beings, to tell this guy 'no, you don't get a vanilla shake with dinner. You'll eat your meatloaf, then you'll die'?"

  8. Laura K  •  Sep 23, 2011 @12:53 pm

    I feel a lot of conflict over this one too. I would submit it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Can concerns about inhumanity to the prisoner retain some voice? What about a maximum cost–including the cost of labor for the cooks to make all the extra stuff?

    Honestly, when I read the article about this on yahoo this morning I almost threw up halfway through Brewer's request list. My nausea was brought on by the sheer excess–and yeah, it's funny because like Patrick, I thought of the Guards having a royal feast, which ameliorated my frustration a little. But still…

    We have the death penalty. I'm conflicted about it, deeply, because I'm thrilled that they did Brewer in and apalled that Davis might have been innocent. And what is left rattling around my head this morning? Brewer ordered a repast worthy of 'Caligula Does Dallas' and didn't eat any of it. So he had the Gods only know how big an army of people running around getting the stuff, cooking the stuff (and doing the damned WASH) and he just sat there grinning? How is making him the center of a one ring food circus going to make us more humane or enlightened as executioners?

    One other aspect of this troubles me deeply, and was even more sickening than the list of food insanity this morning. What about the widow or sister of a man dragged to death behind a truck? Or the surviving family of the victims in Clark's reference? I believe it is a genuine cruelty to them to know that those responsible for the horrendous suffering of their families were given that level of indulgence. That much attention and fanfare and power and yeah…fluffling. Surely that's a cruelty we can avoid somehow…?

  9. Uppercase Matt  •  Sep 23, 2011 @7:29 pm

    They never got those fancy meals in Texas anyway — the rule was that they'd get whatever the prison kitchen could come up with based on what they had on hand, and they'd try to approximate the request. So "a pound of barbecue" turns into a "reasonable portion" of something close to BBQ that the kitchen can put together.

  10. John Burgess  •  Sep 24, 2011 @7:01 am

    Uh oh… since that 3lb lobster is now off the menu, I'm having to rethink things. Somebody who needs killing is not going to get killed is the likely result.

  11. Ken  •  Sep 24, 2011 @7:06 am

    Well, you could kill someone here in California. But you'd probably never get executed. The good part: since we spend about $300 million on the death penalty for every person we actually execute, a good dinner probably won't phase us. Bad part: state law requires that your last meal be vegan, sustainable, and localvore. Localvore at San Quentin.

  12. Charles  •  Sep 24, 2011 @8:45 pm

    Localvore at San Quentin

    I'll have the 2011 Pruno to wash down whatever that guard brought for lunch.

  13. Jim  •  Sep 25, 2011 @8:42 am

    John Whitmire is one mean son of a bitch.

    Contrast that with: Lawrence Russell Brewer, a white supremacist who was executed on Wednesday for chaining a black man, James Byrd Jr., 49, to the back of his pickup truck and dragging him down a bumpy country road to his death a decade ago.

    If the first statement is your response to the treatment of the person described in the second statement, you are indeed one delicate flower, Magnolia.
    How about we give him whatever he wants for a last meal, and then dispatch him the same way he did his victim? Put on your big girl panties, and find something important to worry about.

  14. Patrick  •  Sep 25, 2011 @2:49 pm

    I'm persuaded Jim. Obviously they should have fed Brewer to wild animals. Then someone would have had a decent meal.

  15. Jim48043  •  Sep 26, 2011 @12:50 pm

    I took Patrick to have meant "mean" in this sense:

    adjective, -er, -est.
    1. offensive, selfish, or unaccommodating; nasty; malicious: a mean remark; He gets mean when he doesn't get his way.
    2. small-minded or ignoble: mean motives.
    3. penurious, stingy, or miserly: a person who is mean about money.
    4. inferior in grade, quality, or character: no mean reward.
    5. low in status, rank, or dignity: mean servitors

    There are a lot of authoritarian politicians who can be so described. Mr. Brewer's evil does not make Whitmire less mean.

  16. SPQR  •  Sep 26, 2011 @1:55 pm

    When those pathetic Tea Partiers cheered the cold-blooded killings of hundreds of people, weren’t they cheering the fact that there are a few poor bastards who are lower on the ladder than they?

    Ah, yes, the TEA Party is full of ignorant rednecks theme. Lying to yourself and others to maintain the all important Self delusion is not a sign of your superiority intelligence, tomd. Far from it.

  17. IgotBupkis, President, United Anarchist Society  •  Sep 27, 2011 @4:18 am

    Self delusion is not a sign of your superiority intelligence, tomd. Far from it.

    Dude, he's not self-deluding, he's not even vaguely rational:

    contemporary Texas rushing its economy to the bottom

    Unemployment, 8/2011
    27 TEXAS 8.5%
    (source: BLS

    Hardly a state in deep doo-doo.

  18. IgotBupkis, President, United Anarchist Society  •  Sep 27, 2011 @4:27 am

    Isn’t having someone to be cruel to the whole point of the exercise

    I'll take this one seriously despite the tone and the rather "Why YES, I AM clueless, how did you know?" content of it.

    No, the purpose of the exercise is not to be cruel. The purpose of the exercise is to protect society from a mad dog, one whose own actions have demonstrated that he is not, in fact, worthy of the term "human". That last part is a very tricky and dangerously interpretable phrase, but beyond its usage in identifying the moral limits of The State's direct actions, it isn't, and should not be, applied. The "man" in question was a clear mad dog. Society has an interest in removing mad dogs from interaction with the general populace. It also has no direct obligation to support said mad dogs, nor to not quietly and as mercifully as possible, put them to sleep. There is no need for any aspect of "revenge" on the part of The State itself (regardless of the closure and/or satisfaction it may provide the family of the victim) . In fact, The State should do everything possible to make the execution as coldly reasoned, carefully planned, and painless as possible. The State is not there to revenge, not to punish, it is simply removing a mad dog from the populace, permanently, so that there will be no more victims.

  19. mikee  •  Oct 7, 2011 @9:08 am

    I spoke with a person directly involved in providing the last meals of convicts in Texas. The convicts can ask for anything they want, indeed, say two chicken fried steaks. Then they are supplied one chicken fried steak. No big deal.

  20. Ken  •  Oct 12, 2011 @9:21 am

    I love The Onion.

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