A death row inmate’s last meal request was so extravagant on September 21, 2011, that the state of Texas stopped doing them.
Lawrence Russell Brewer ordered a feast before his execution at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville.
His order included two chicken-fried steaks with gravy and sliced onions, a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger, a cheese omelette with ground beef, tomatoes, onions, capsicum and jalapenos and a bowl of fried okra with tomato sauce.
He also asked for a pound of barbecued meat with half a loaf of white bread, three fully loaded fajitas and a meat-lovers pizza.
For dessert, he asked for a pint of vanilla ice cream and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts on top.
To wash it all down, he asked for three root beers.
When the meal was presented, Brewer told prison staff he wasn’t hungry.
Politicians fumed when they learnt the meal had been discarded.
The state of Texas immediately abolished the practice of giving last meals to condemned inmates.
Instead, they are fed the meal they would have received on any other day behind bars, the same food other prisoners would have eaten.
Brewer was not widely mourned after his execution by lethal injection.
An unrepentant white supremacist, Brewer and two others offered Black man James Byrd Jr a ride.
They then took him to a remote road, chained his ankles to the back of their ute and dragged him for five kilometres.
Though the dragging killed him, an autopsy showed he would have been conscious for most of the horrendous ordeal.
Brewer had not met Byrd before the attack.
“I have no regrets. No, I’d do it all over again, to tell you the truth,” he said the day before he was executed.
What serial killers ate as their last meal on death row
