The United States is one of the few countries left in the world which embraces capital punishment (look at who else is on that list – no one else in the first world and otherwise a great bunch of company, eh?).
A big part of the lore around death row inmates (perhaps straddling the line about “cruel and unusual punishment“?) is the attention paid to death row inmates’ last meals.
Although this site doesn’t have the greatest design and seems to be as much about selling a book as raising awareness about issues around the death penalty, I found the juxtaposition of facts about death row inmates and the banality of their last meals (made even moreso by the cheap clip-art food graphics) quite compelling and even tragic (although someone on MetaFilter asks the obvious question “Do you ever wonder what the victim’s last meals were?”).
Still, it’s a reminder that, no matter how good, bad or truly evil someone is, we’re ultimately all human. (Although there are also some who feel that calling someone “evil” is sometimes giving a person more attention than they deserve.)
(via MetaFilter)