Christa Pike, 49, refused to select a final meal before her botched execution in Tennessee last week.
Pike remains hospitalized at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville after executioners pushed two syringes of the state’s lethal chemical mixture into her intravenous lines without causing cardiac arrest, according to her legal team. She was sentenced to death in 1996 for the torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer.
While Pike declined the tradition, other condemned prisoners have made requests so extreme they changed state policy entirely. Lawrence Russell Brewer, 44, a white supremacist executed in Texas on September 21, 2011, for the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr., ordered a staggering spread: two chicken fried steaks smothered in gravy with sliced onions; a triple bacon cheeseburger with fixings on the side; a cheese omelette with ground beef, tomatoes, onions, peppers and jalapeños; a large bowl of fried okra with ketchup; one pound of barbecue meat with half a loaf of white bread; three fajitas with all the trimmings; a Meat Lovers pizza; one pint of vanilla ice cream; a slab of peanut butter fudge; and three root beers.
When the feast arrived, Brewer refused to touch any of it.
His actions ultimately led Texas to abolish the long-standing tradition of final meals.
The tradition had produced other memorably unusual requests. Victor Feguer, 27, requested a single olive with the pit still in it before his hanging at the Iowa State Penitentiary on March 15, 1963. Feguer, convicted of federal kidnapping and murder for killing Dr. Edward Bartels in July 1960, told guards he hoped an olive tree would grow from his grave, “as a sign of peace.” The doctor’s body had been found in an Illinois cornfield with a single gunshot to the head.
John Wayne Gacy, 52, one of America’s most notorious serial killers, leaned into his past before his lethal injection at Illinois’ Stateville Correctional Center on May 10, 1994. Gacy, convicted of murdering at least 33 boys and young men in the 1970s, requested a bucket of KFC’s original recipe chicken, French fries, 12 deep-fried shrimp, and a pound of strawberries. He had previously managed several KFC restaurants owned by his father-in-law.
Some requests blended the culinary with the spiritual. James Edward Smith, 37, executed by lethal injection at Texas’ Huntsville Unit on June 26, 1990, asked for a lump of rhaeakunda dirt for his final meal. Smith, found guilty of fatally shooting Larry Don Rohus during a 1983 Houston office building robbery, practiced voodoo and believed the soil would assist his journey into reincarnation. His request was denied, and he was given plain yoghurt instead.
Timothy McVeigh, 33, took a simpler approach before his June 11, 2001, lethal injection at the Federal Correctional Complex in Indiana for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people. McVeigh ate two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
Pike’s case marks the second failed execution in Tennessee this year, following a botched lethal injection in May. Her legal team is rushing emergency motions after revealing she survived the syringes. The microphone in her execution chamber was eventually turned off after the procedure went wrong.
Lawyers for Christa Pike are rushing emergency motions after revealing the condemned inmate survived lethal injection syringes.