Another case of one thoughtless miscreant spoiling it for everybody else:
HOUSTON — For decades, Texas inmates scheduled to be executed had at least one thing to look forward to: a last meal. Earl Carl Heiselbetz Jr. ordered two breaded pork chops and three scrambled eggs in 2000. Frank Basil McFarland asked for a heaping portion of lettuce and four celery stalks in 1998. Doyle Skillern ate a sirloin steak in 1985.
But 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.
[. . .]
Mr. Brewer did not eat his last meal, and Mr. Whitmire said he felt that the inmate had ordered it in an attempt to “make a mockery out of the process.”
Shame, shame on him if he was mean enough to want to "make a mockery of the process" without caring how it would affect his fellow death row peers. On the other hand, don't you just hate it when you order your favorite meal and lose your appetite at the last minute for some unknown reason? Guess your eyes were bigger than your stomach, mister!
I think those of us on the political right should oppose this move on the good conservative grounds that "last meals" have been a tradition for decades. How can we just blithely throw something away that's been the subject of so many lame radio and TV discussions and hack newspaper features? Next thing you know, someblody'll be calling for an end to "how much the items in the 12 days of Christmas would cost today" features, and the world would tilt on its axis.
