Oklahoma to continue last meal tradition for condemned inmates

"Last meal: Ruben Cantu"
by Kate MacDonald

Oklahoma will continue to grant special last meal requests for death row inmates before they're executed.

Despite a high-profile move by Texas prison officials to end the long-standing tradition, Oklahoma will continue to grant last meal requests to death row inmates before they're executed.

Last week, the head of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice announced that death row inmates in the Lone Star State will no longer be granted opulent last meal requests after a convicted murderer didn't touch a large offering provided by a Texas prison.

Lawrence Russell Brewer, who was executed Wednesday for the June 1998 dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas, reportedly ordered a massive feast for his last meal, including two chicken-fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat lover's pizza, a pint of ice cream and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts.

When Texas prison officials reported that Brewer didn't eat a bite of food before he was killed by lethal injection, state Sen. John Whitmire promptly wrote a letter to the director of the state's corrections department demanding the long-standing practice be discontinued.

Within hours, Whitmire's request was granted by Brad Livingston, the executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, who found the senator's demands appropriate.

Jerry Massie, spokesman for the Oklahoma Corrections Department, said he hasn't heard from any angry lawmakers since the news broke in Texas. He said the state has strict guidelines concerning last meal requests that protect against inmates wasting huge quantities of food.

“The meal isn't prepared here at the prison,” Massie said. “There's a $15 limit and all the food must be obtained locally, in McAlester.”

Massie, who's been with the Corrections Department for 25 years, said that wasting a last meal isn't typical. He said executions typically take place at 6 p.m., with a prisoner's last meal delivered about noon the same day.

“For the most part, they eat it,” he said. “Of course, some times they don't.”

In 2011, 2 inmates have been executed in Oklahoma.

Billy Don Alverson, 39, was executed Jan. 6 for the 1995 beating death of a Tulsa store clerk. Jeffrey David Matthews, 38, died by lethal injection 5 days later for killing his uncle in 1994.

According to prison officials, Alverson requested a large pepperoni and Italian sausage pizza and a large Dr Pepper for his last meal. Matthews ordered a small deep-dish pizza, deep-fried shrimp with cocktail sauce and two Hush Puppies with vinegar sauce.

Massie said the tradition of granting a last meal request for a condemned prisoner is universal, at least as far as he's concerned.

“It's pretty much the same throughout the world,” he said. “I believe we've done it here (in Oklahoma) since we started doing executions.”

Since a federal ban on capital punishment was lifted in the 1970s, Oklahoma has executed 96 inmates, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Only Texas, with 475, has executed more prisoners. In fact, Oklahoma's nearest rivals, in terms of post-ban executions, are Florida (69) and Missouri (68). [my note----this is factually incorrect....Virginia ranks 2nd in US executions with 109 since the death penalty was re-legalized on July 2, 1976]

Massie said there are currently no executions scheduled in Oklahoma.

Source: The Oklahoman, September 27, 2011

Related articles:

Death Penalty News: Texas Prisons End Special Last Meals In ...

Sep 23, 2011

Texas inmates who are set to be executed will no longer get their choice of last meals, a change prison officials made Thursday after a prominent state senator became miffed over an expansive request from a man ...

http://deathpenaltynews.blogspot.com/

Death Penalty News: 'Last Meals', a series of oil paintings by death ...

Jul 22, 2011

Originally conceived to participate in the Texas Moratorium Network's exhibit Justice For All? Artists Reflect on the Death Penalty, the first painting of the series, Last Meal: Ruben Cantu, has been shown at galleries in Austin ...

http://deathpenaltynews.blogspot.com/

Death Penalty News: Alabama executes Derrick O'Neal Mason

Sep 23, 2011

In the final hours before the execution, Mason refused to eat breakfast and he wasn't expected to eat dinner, either, prison officials said. He did not request a special last meal, saying he was fasting today. Several people...

http://deathpenaltynews.blogspot.com/

Comments

USA | What happens in the final weeks before an execution? These reporters were inside the room.

The journalists behind ‘The Last 12 Weeks’ earned extraordinary access to a death penalty defense team—and faced difficult ethical choices Many defense lawyers are naturally cagey. They work in a pressure cooker, protecting their clients’ rights while fighting for the best possible outcome. And arguably, the stakes can’t get any higher than trying to save a client’s life. So no, defense lawyers don’t usually invite journalists into strategy meetings. But that’s what happened when Marshall Project reporter Maurice Chammah and Serial Productions senior producer Alvin Melathe spent the final few months before a Texas execution embedded with a capital defense team.

North Korea | 'I was only 9': North Korean defector recalls childhood memory of public execution

Kim Eun-joo was 9 years old when her teacher stopped their lesson and told the class to follow her outside. The children were marched to a public execution ground in North Korea. “I would cry even when our family dog died,” Kim said in a recent interview with The Korea Times. “But the first time I watched humans killing a human, I had no words for what I was feeling. It was the most brutal scene I have ever seen, in any movie or in real life.” The memory has stayed with her ever since. Now a human rights advocate after defecting from North Korea, Kim recently brought that childhood scene to the 9th World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Paris, where North Korea’s use of public executions and capital punishment was officially placed on the agenda for the first time.

19 July 1943 | Auschwitz's Largest Public Hanging: 12 Polish Prisoners Executed in Escape Reprisal

OSWIECIM, Poland — The SS carried out the largest public hanging in Auschwitz history on July 19, 1943, executing 12 Polish prisoners before other inmates as collective punishment for escapes and civilian contacts. The victims, all from the camp’s surveyors’ labor unit, were hanged on gallows built in front of the camp kitchen during an Auschwitz I roll call. The SS orchestrated this reprisal following prisoner escapes from the surveyors’ detail and unauthorized communication between inmates and civilians. Camp authorities used the recent escapes as a pretext to impose collective punishment.

Japan: Capital punishment for a minor

Death chamber at Tokyo Detention Center The Supreme Court's recent decision to uphold the death sentence given in a lay judge trial to a 24-year-old man for murders he committed when he was a minor raises questions about the lay judge trial system and capital punishment. These include whether the lay judges correctly understood the spirit of the Juvenile Law in sentencing the defendant to death. It was the 1st death sentence handed down on a minor in a lay judge trial. The murders took place in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, in 2010 when Yutaro Chiba was 18 - meaning he fell under the purview of the Juvenile Law. Chiba was convicted of entering his ex-girlfriend's house and stabbing to death the girl's sister and a female friend of the girl with a butcher knife, seriously injuring a male friend of the sister and abducting the girl. Prosecutors said Chiba killed the victims because they were trying to separate him and his former girlfriend. Since Chiba pleaded n...

Texas: The inmates who refused to die quietly and had to be gassed out of their cells before execution

Former crime reporter Michelle Lyons, who witnessed nearly 300 executions in Texas, US, reveals the desperate acts of death row prisoners who refused to accept their fate After spending years or often decades locked up in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day, most Death Row inmates go willingly to their executions. However, some refuse to die quietly - with officers forced to gas them out of cells, strap up their heads and even give chase across prison grounds. Michelle Lyons, who has witnessed nearly 300 executions in Texas, US, exclusively tells Sun Online how certain inmates "fight like hell" in their last moments. On most occasions, Michelle watched from the witness area, with the killers already on the gurney - the stretcher where they'd be given a lethal injection. Seven prisoners once tried to escape from the Row in Huntsville - with one shoving magazines and newspapers under his clothes to help him roll over razor-wire fences. Others have had to b...

Former Florida cop to be executed on same day as 80-year-old Pasco man

In an unprecedented move in the modern history of capital punishment, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday cleared the way for 2 executions to occur on the same day. DeSantis reset the execution of James Duckett, whose execution earlier this year was stayed amid efforts to secure DNA testing and analysis of evidence in his case. Duckett’s execution was reset for July 28. That is the same day previously set for the execution of Dominick Occhicone. Court records indicate that Duckett’s execution is scheduled for noon. Occhicone’s is set to follow at 6 p.m.

Idaho | Death row prisoners sue over state's new firing squad

BOISE (Idaho Statesman) – Days after Idaho made the switch to a firing squad for executions, two Idaho death row prisoners next in line to be put to death sued the state prison system, saying its director withheld information about how she settled on the specifics for carrying out the method. Attorneys for prisoners Thomas Creech and Gerald Pizzuto filed suit this week in state district court against Idaho Department of Correction Director Bree Derrick. In the filing, they called her approval of an updated standard operating procedure for the firing squad and lethal injection as a backup method “arbitrary, capricious, or an abuse of discretion and in excess of the statutory authority of the agency.”

Florida executes Dennis Sochor

Man, 74, becomes oldest inmate executed in Florida in state’s 10th lethal injection this year Florida put to death one of its oldest prisoners in its history on Tuesday, a 74-year-old convicted murderer who was 1 of 3 older inmates scheduled for execution within the span of a month in the nation’s busiest death penalty state. Dennis Sochor was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m. following a 3-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke, the office of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said. He was convicted of killing a woman on Jan. 1, 1982, just hours after meeting her at a New Year’s Eve party.

Oldest inmate set to be executed in Florida will face strict spending limit for final meal

An entire category of food is also off-limits for final meal requests in Florida Florida is currently preparing to execute its oldest inmate later today (July 14), a 74-year-old convicted murderer who has been on death row since the 1980s—but his final meal will be limited by a strict budget. Dennis Sochor is scheduled to be put to death later today, making history as the oldest inmate to ever be executed in the state. The criminal, who has been on death row for nearly 40 years, will be administered the lethal three-drug injection, with the process due to begin at around 6pm.

Florida | Former warden recalls botched electrocution that left him battling PTSD for 13 years and turned him into an abolitionist

Ron McAndrew anticipated it would be just another standard execution. He had been assigned to carry out the death of Cuban refugee Pedro Medina via electric chair within the confines of Florida State Prison. Fifteen years had passed since Medina's conviction for the murder of 52-year-old Dorothy James, and McAndrew's responsibility was to oversee the administration of lethal electrical currents to his brain. Having already supervised two previous executions using the identical procedure and raised in a community that strongly supported capital punishment, he expected a swift conclusion with justice delivered.

Death Penalty News

Search This Blog