Executioner's meal
The executioner's meal is the last meal a person sentenced to death before their execution is called. As a rule, the convicted person's wishes are taken into account.
In the USA attempts are being made to enable the convicted person to have any desired meal. However, this is often limited to products that are locally available and can be prepared in the prison kitchen. There is usually a financial limit, in Florida it is $ 40. Experience from prisons shows that only a small number of those sentenced to death do without their so-called last meal . The most requested food is cheeseburgers . In Texas, since 2003, following complaints that the excessive public interest in such meals is tasteless, this information has not been posted on the Justice Department website. After Lawrence Brewer ordered a large meal in September 2011 but didn't touch it, Texas Senator John Whitmire complained about it. The hangman's meal was an “extremely inappropriate privilege”, since the victims had no right to it either. Not long afterwards, Law Enforcement Director Brad Livingston announced that the practice of a hangman's meal in Texas would be discontinued immediately.
The criminologist Hans von Hentig sees executioner's meals in analogy to the feeding of sacrificial animals and attests to them the deeper sense of demonstrating legal peace between the executioner and the executors of the death penalty: "Whoever accepts the executioner's meal, tacitly concludes original feuds with those who are guilty bear his death. ”In addition, with the executioner's meal, the person to be executed is granted a final wish .
Since in Christian cultures executions are almost always scheduled for the early hours of the morning before sunrise, executioner's meals here are usually dinners . If the executioner's meal is served at a different time, the condemned person will not get anything to eat, even if there is another meal before the execution.
literature
- Hans von Hentig : Punishment. Its origin, purpose and psychology . Hodge, London et al. 1937.
- Hans von Hentig: From the origin of the executioner's meal . Mohr, Tübingen 1958.
- Michel Foucault : Discipline and punish. The birth of the prison . Pantheon Books, New York NY 1977, ISBN 0-394-49942-5 .
- Richard van Dülmen : Theater of horror. Crime and punishment in early modern Germany . Polity Press, Oxford 1990, ISBN 0-7456-0616-4 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Death Row Fact Sheet , Florida Department of Corrections
- ↑ Last-meal request page taken down from Texas corrections web site . The Seattle Times, December 13, 2003
- ↑ Texas Cancels Death Row Executioner's Meal , orf.at, September 23, 2011