Texas Eliminates Last Meal for Death Row Inmates

Troy Davis chose not to have a last meal on Wednesday -- but if he were in Texas now, he wouldn't even have had the choice.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice -- which also had a high-profile execution on Wednesday -- that of white supremacist Lawrence Brewer -- decided on Thursday to eliminate the last-meal practice, in which death-row inmates were allowed to order a special meal before being taken to the execution chamber.

The last meal is nearly universal in the United States in states that still practise the death penalty.

The move was prompted by a letter from John Whitmire, a Texas state senator, to the Department of Criminal Justice. It is extremely inappropriate to give a person sentenced to death such a privilege, Whitmire wrote. It's a privilege which the perpetrator did not provide to their victim.

He didn't have to ask twice. The department received his letter on Thursday and abolished the last meal immediately, one day after Brewer ordered an extravagant last meal but refused to eat it when it came.

The state is sure to face criticism for the decision, especially since it was in the spotlight already for executing four times more inmates than the rest of the country combined, including some inmates whose convictions were disputed.

But death penalty opponents didn't see it as a big deal in the context of what they call a grossly unjust system.

It's a minor thing compared with the fact that they are killing him, Brian Evans, a campaigner for Amnesty International's Death Penalty Abolition Campaign, told Reuters. The cruelty of the whole process is much larger than whether you get to pick the last meal that you eat.

Jim Harrington, the director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, said he even saw the elimination of the last meal as a good thing, because the practice masked some of the cruelty of the death penalty itself.

I am totally opposed to capital punishment, he told Reuters, but I certainly don't understand the logic of a last meal, and the way it's turned into such a show.