A death row inmate bizarrely requested a lump of dirt for his final meal, but he was denied his request.
James Edward Smith was sentenced to death for a 1983 murder during a robbery in Houston, Texas.
Smith was convicted of fatally shooting Larry Don Rohus, the district manager of an insurance company, during a robbery, per reports.
On the day of the crime, Smith entered the cashier’s office armed with a pistol and demanded money.
While another employee hid, Rohus complied, placing cash into a small bin and setting it on a table. As Rohus walked away, Smith shot him twice, killing him instantly.
Smith was arrested shortly after the shooting, and apprehended by a group of Rohus' coworkers and local construction workers who tackled him in a nearby parking lot.
He was held until police arrived. During his trial, Smith confessed to six additional "ritualistic" murders, though these claims were never proven.
Originally from Kentucky, Smith was sentenced to death by lethal injection. In the days leading up to his execution, he made an unconventional final meal request - rhaeakunda dirt.
The inmate intended to use the dirt for a voodoo ritual that he believed would aid in his reincarnation, per the Express.
However, since dirt was not on the list of approved foods, prison officials denied the request and instead provided him with plain yogurt.
Smith’s last words were "Hare Krishna," a well-known Hindu mantra from the 15th-century Bhakti movement before he was executed in 1990.
Last meals are often an interesting topic of discussion, but if you find yourself on death row in Texas, you won't get to make a request.
Texas ended the long-standing tradition of offering death row inmates a final meal before execution, following an outrageous request from convicted white supremacist Lawrence Russell Brewer.
Brewer, 44, was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr., a Black man who was brutally tortured and killed by Brewer and two accomplices, John William King and Shawn Allen Berry.
Byrd was chained by the ankles to a pickup truck and dragged for three miles, resulting in his decapitation and dismemberment.
According to the BBC, Brewer and King were sentenced to death, marking the first time white men had received the death penalty for killing a Black man in Texas.
Their actions were tied to their affiliation with white supremacist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan.
Before his execution, Brewer submitted a staggering list of foods for his last meal: chicken-fried steaks, fried okra with ketchup, a cheese omelet with ground beef, jalapeños, and bell peppers, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, three fajitas, one pound of barbecue with half a loaf of white bread, pizza, a pint of vanilla ice cream, peanut butter fudge, and three root beers.
Despite the prison staff’s efforts to fulfill his request, Brewer refused to eat any of it, telling guards he wasn’t hungry.
His refusal sparked outrage, leading Texas Senator John Whitmire to take immediate action.
Whitmire, appalled by the incident, wrote a letter to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, stating: "Enough is enough...it is extremely inappropriate to give a person sentenced to death such a privilege. It's a privilege which the perpetrator did not provide to their victim."
As a result, Texas abolished the 87-year-old tradition of granting final meal requests for death row inmates.
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