Pecan pie (for later) via Flickr/CC.
What can a last meal say about someone sentenced to die? In some cases, it’s a lot.
Take, for instance, the case of Ricky Ray Rector. Rector was convicted of the 1981 murder of a police officer in Arkansas. In the aftermath, Rector shot himself in the head, giving himself brain damage. When it came time to execute him, in 1992, Rector said he’d save an untouched piece of pecan pie “for later.” Legal scholars and Presidential elections (Clinton’s first) have fought over whether Rector was legally competent to understand what was happening to him. Was he joking about saving it for later? Or did he not understand he was about to die?
But last meals can, potentially, tell us more about someone sentenced to die: Whether they think of themselves as innocent or not. A new study released by researchers at Cornell University have found that people who think of themselves as innocent are nearly three times more likely to decline a last meal than people who have admitted guilt, and those who have admitted guilt request more than a third more calories in their last meal than those who maintain their innocence.
Kevin Kniffin, lead author of the study, published in the journal Laws, says that he thinks it’s because people who have admitted guilt are more “comfortable” with their fate.
“People who are facing an execution for which they can claim innocence appear to lack an appetite when compared with the rest of the sample, whereas people who have accepted guilt appear relatively more ‘comfortable,’” he said. In the case of one prisoner, who said he’d “made his peace” with his sentence, Kniffin says the “acceptance of his guilt and possibly of his sentence permitted him to enjoy a final meal.”
Kniffin and his colleagues studied the cases of 247 people executed in the United States between 2002 and 2006 and found that more than 90 percent of those who admitted guilt (based on their last words) requested a last meal. Roughly 70 percent of those who denied guilt requested a last meal, and about 85 percent of those whose last words were unrelated to their crime or sentence requested a last meal.
Of course, the majority of those who proclaimed they were innocent still took a last meal, because, hey, you gotta eat.
In most of these cases, we have no way of knowing whether the executed is actually innocent—in many cases there is overwhelming evidence against them. And Kniffin never argues that whether someone requests a last meal or not should have any sort of actual legal implications, but he comes close: “Knowing one’s last meal request and one’s last words can provide valuable new variables for retrospectively assessing the processes that led to past executions,” he writes. “The intersection of legal scholarship and food in [certain cases] merits a closer integration of multidisciplinary research concerning food consumption.”
Some people have already taken a look at it. The 2005 documentary Last Supper suggested that “there is a connection between the declination of a last meal and whether or not a person’s guilt has been posthumously disputed and challenged.”
In some places, that information won’t even be available. After Lawrence Russell Brewer (you might remember him because he dragged a black man behind his truck for miles) requested an absurd amount of food and then didn’t eat any of it, Texas changed its policies to not allow death row inmates a choice about their last meal. “They will receive the same meal served to other offenders on the unit,” Brad Livingston, executive director of the Texas criminal justice department said in 2011, shortly after the decision was made. Texas, if you’ll remember, just executed a foreign citizen against the wishes of everyone besides Texas.
Those who maintain their innocence up until their death also sometimes appear to have an axe to grind against their prison. In 2005, Elias Syriani, was executed for the murder of his wife in North Carolina. Before his execution, he said “I want no meal from this place.” Kniffin notes that “to the extent that agreement to accept the traditional invitation of a last meal implies some consent to the execution process, it is sensible that people who deny guilt will tend to deny the invitation to the last meal.”
For some, it’s just one last chance to say “screw you” to the system.