Death row - the last last meal

I promise I won't keep banging on about this, but I thought I'd post this as (a) it shows just how little feeling the state of Texas has for its death row inmates and (b) (perhaps hearteningly) that even at the end some people manage to have enough humour left to take the p*** out of the system! (This prisoner was executed last autumn.)

State prison officials decided on Thursday to end the practice of giving last meals to inmates about to be executed, their decision coming the day after they honored an elaborate meal request from Lawrence Russell Brewer, one of the men convicted in the 1998 racially motivated dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper.

Before Mr. Brewer was executed by lethal injection in the Huntsville Unit on Wednesday, he was given the last meal of his request: two chicken-fried steaks with gravy and sliced onions; a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger; a cheese omelet with ground beef, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and jalapeños; a bowl of fried okra with ketchup; one pound of barbecued meat with half a loaf of white bread; three fajitas; a meat-lover’s pizza; one pint of Blue Bell Ice Cream; a slab of peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts; and three root beers.

The meal outraged State Senator John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee. In a phone call and letter to the executive director of the state prison agency, Mr. Whitmire asked that the agency end the practice of last meals or he would get the State Legislature to pass a bill doing so.