This spring, I visited the Boise Art Museum to see “The Last Supper,” an exhibition of ceramic plates painted with images of the last meals requested by 1,000 people sentenced to death in the United States. Over a 22-year period, artist Julie Green rendered each meal in brushstrokes of cobalt blue on second-hand white ceramic plates, then fired them in a kiln.
While teaching at the University of Oklahoma in 1999, Green opened a local newspaper and read about a 45-year-old man condemned for murder on Oklahoma’s death row. In the account of his execution, an arresting detail leaped out: For his last meal, Norman Lee Newsted requested six tacos, a half-dozen glazed doughnuts, and a Cherry Coke.
Something about it compelled Green to tuck the newspaper clip into a folder. Six months later, Green encountered another death penalty story that vividly described the last breath, the dimming eyes and the trembling foot of 41-year-old Malcolm Rent Johnson. Convicted of raping and murdering an elderly woman, Johnson was the 20th person to be executed in Oklahoma since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s. His final meal: three fried chicken thighs, a pile of shrimp, Tater Tots with ketchup, two slices of pecan pie, strawberry ice cream, honey and biscuits, and a Coke.
“So specific. So personal,” Green later said. “It humanized death row for me.”
From a distance, Green’s two-tone mosaic of plates on the gallery walls reminded me of the blue-and-white Dutch pottery hung on some grandmother’s walls. Up close, the details were portraits of craving and comfort: Bologna and cheese sandwiches. Butter pecan ice cream. Fried green tomatoes. Cherry limeade. Apple pie.
The exhibit made me realize how little I know about capital punishment. For most of my life, I’d considered the death penalty only abstractly, through the distance of moral reasoning and philosophy. A few years ago, while writing In Light of All Darkness, I stepped closer, viewing it through the lens of one crime — the 1993 kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas. Her killer, Richard Allen Davis, has spent three decades on death row in California, one of 27 states with the death penalty but one of only four that have moratoriums on executions. Davis will likely die in prison of old age.
My research made me aware of how much suffering one person can cause. I searched through case records for some trace of humanity in Davis’ past. Some small act of kindness, any evidence of love. But I found none.
I wondered: If I had the chance to sit down and talk with Davis, what would I feel? What if I felt empathy? That would bother me. What if I didn’t? That might bother me even more. Could I look another human in the eye and wish for him to be killed? I haven’t had the chance to find out: Davis has not responded to my letters requesting an interview.
“So specific. So personal. It humanized death row for me.”
As I stood before a wall of last suppers, I realized that food is love. In the aftermath of a deadly tornado, I witnessed the healing power of casseroles, saw church groups cooking in parking lots for people who’d lost their kitchens. At my uncle’s funeral, I felt the urge to ease my family’s grief by making great-grandma’s okazu, her Japanese comfort food. Cooking is kindness in action, one small thing we can control in the midst of all we can’t. We may be powerless to make the pain go away, but folks still need to eat.
The exhibit featured only two plates from Idaho. One depicts the prison’s “Daily Special” on Nov. 18, 2011: hot dogs with sauerkraut, baked beans and veggie sticks, gelatin studded with fruit, and a “special treat” from the prison chef — strawberry ice cream. That was Paul Rhoades’ last meal. The other, which Keith Michael Wells ate on Jan. 6, 1994, shows a whole lobster beside a rack of prime rib, two pints of black walnut ice cream, a 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, and a half-gallon carton of milk.
Almost nine miles due south of where I stood in the Boise Art Museum, eight men reside on Idaho’s death row. (A ninth, the only woman, lives in a women’s prison in Pocatello.) I thought about them, especially in light of the new Idaho law that will take effect in July 2026, making a firing squad the primary method of execution.
Idaho 18 November 2011; Chose the prison’s “daily special” of hot dogs, sauerkraut, baked beans, veggie sticks with ranch dressing, and gelatin with fruit–although the prison chef did add strawberry ice cream as a special treat. 2012, 9 in. diameter; Idaho 06 January 1994; Prime rib, lobster, 2 pints of black walnut ice cream, rolls, 1/2 gallon milk, 2 liter bottle of Coca Cola. 2002, 10 in. diameter; Texas 22 May 2002; None. 2021, 6 in. diameter; California 17 January 2006; Had a last meal of buffalo steak, a bucket of KFC white-meat-only chicken, sugar-free pecan pie, sugar-free black walnut ice cream, Indian pan-fried bread and whole milk (ice cream was left out one hour to thaw, and turned into a milkshake by hand). 2006, 10 in. diameter. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, Gift of The Last Supper Irrevocable Trust, 2023.6.
Four other states allow execution by firing squad: Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. But Idaho is the only state that has declared it the primary method. (Some others let condemned people choose.) Even for a gun-loving state like Idaho, it seemed odd, a step backward. “Barbaric,” as one friend put it.
Then I learned about Thomas Creech, a 74-year-old serial killer who is Idaho’s longest-serving resident of death row — incarcerated for more than 50 years, on death row for 46. On a winter day in February 2024, he ate his last supper (fried chicken, mashed potatoes with gravy, corn, rolls and ice cream). The next day, he was strapped to a bed in the death chamber while three Idaho Department of Correction employees searched for a vein. They poked him eight times in his hands, feet and legs, but his veins just kept collapsing. After about an hour, the execution — the state’s first in 12 years — was called off.
To learn more, I called my friend Kevin Fixler, a reporter for the Idaho Statesman who interviewed Creech after his failed execution. “I laid on that table and fully expected to die that day,” Creech told him. The execution is supposed to be rescheduled, but Creech’s lawyers say that a second attempt would be “cruel and unusual punishment,” and therefore unconstitutional.
How can the method routinely used to euthanize animals go so badly with humans? “Lethal injection drugs have been increasingly hard to get,” Fixler said. “Drug companies don’t want to be associated with executions.” This has led to states passing shield laws to protect the identity of drug sources, making the drugs easier to obtain. But administering them remains a challenge: Most doctors want nothing to do with an act that violates the Hippocratic Oath. So the task falls to prison employees who lack the training and experience of doctors and nurses.
Seeking another point of view, I spoke with Craig Durham, a lawyer who works on death penalty cases in Idaho. He said that death by firing squad might be faster and more painless than a cocktail of lethal substances that can fail in gruesome and excruciating ways. Many states use multiple drugs in a sequence: The first drug sedates, the second paralyzes and the third stops the heart. If one doesn’t work, the others might mask the suffering.
He also raised a point I had not considered: Because it is gory and unsanitary and therefore controversial, firing squads might make the public more aware of executions. If the state is killing someone on behalf of its residents, shouldn’t we know about it — and think seriously about it?
That’s one of the implicit questions raised by “The Last Supper.” “I paint to point,” said Green, who used art as a vehicle for advocacy. I appreciated the way this art compelled me to think, without telling me what to think. It led me to interrogate my assumptions and inspired some thoughtful conversations.
“I paint to point.”
One of them was with my friend Joshua Sharpe, a journalist whose reporting helped exonerate an innocent man convicted of murder, a story he tells in his new book, The Man No One Believed. His stories of wrongful convictions — which are way more common than I’d realized — helped me understand why it takes millions of dollars and decades of court proceedings before a death sentence can be carried out. Sharpe lives in Detroit, but he looked at Green’s exhibit online, where the meals are listed in detail.
“I think what (Green) is doing is adding dignity to this concept of publicizing the last meal,” he said, “taking that information and putting humanity back in.”
While painting the 1,000th plate in September 2021, the artist, 60, was suffering from advanced ovarian cancer. A few weeks later, at home in Corvallis, Oregon, Green ended their life with the assistance of a physician, a right protected by the state’s Death With Dignity Act.
Green’s obituary in The New York Times did not specify their last supper.
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This article appeared in the August 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Food for thought.”
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