Death row inmate orders pizza for homeless as last meal

By Ashley Fantz
CNN
May. 10, 2007

(CNN) -- Just hours before his execution by injection, a Tennessee death row prisoner who was convicted of killing a police officer ordered his final meal -- pizza for a homeless person.

Philip Workman, 53, requested a vegetarian pizza be delivered to a homeless person in Nashville, Workman's attorney confirmed.

Riverbend Maximum Security Institution refused, said Riverbend spokeswoman Dorinda Carter.

"We can get some special things for the inmate but the taxpayers don't really give us permission to donate to charity," Carter said.

According to the state's protocol, a last meal's cost cannot exceed $20.

Workman was executed early Wednesday.

Carter said Workman met with a spiritual adviser Tuesday evening and had also spoken in person with his brother.

Although Tennessee law gave him the option to choose between the electric chair and lethal injection, he refused to make that choice.

"I'm not going to play no killing game," he told CNN in an exclusive interview last month.

Last-minute appeals

Workman was convicted in 1982 of shooting and killing Memphis Police Lt. Ronald Oliver during a botched 1981 robbery of a Wendy's restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee.

His defense said that new ballistics evidence suggests Oliver died from friendly fire at the robbery scene.

They also pointed to the recanted statements of a key eyewitness who now says he lied when he testified at Workman's trial that he saw Workman shoot Oliver.

Workman, a self-described former "junkie," acknowledges robbing the Wendy's with a gun for drug money and tussling with police outside after an employee tripped a silent alarm. But he told CNN that his weapon "involuntarily discharged" when he was hit in the head.

A flurry of appeals were filed in the past few days as Workman's lawyers and Tennessee prosecutors battled over the convict's fate.

One of Workman's final appeals had rested with the U.S. Supreme Court, with his lawyers arguing that the state's newly instituted set of lethal injection procedures were not sufficient to ensure that Workman's death will be peaceful and painless.

Workman had five previous execution dates set and three times came within 72 hours of dying before courts intervened. But his primary attorney, Kelley Henry, had said late Tuesday that she was not optimistic the latest appeal would save her client.

'Deficiencies' in lethal injection procedures

Saying there were "deficiencies" in Tennessee's lethal injection instruction manual, Gov. Phil Bredesen rescinded it in February and gave the state's commissioner of correction 90 days to write a new one.

On April 30, the state issued a new set of lethal injection procedures, but the cocktail of lethal drugs used in the state's executions remained unchanged.

A study published in April by the Public Library of Science -- a nonprofit organization of scientists and doctors -- found the three-drug lethal injection protocol probably left prisoners subject to immense pain before they died.

The creator of the cocktail told CNN he feels that it should be reexamined as a method of execution.

In his talk with CNN, Workman said he feared what lethal injection might feel like.

"It almost makes me want to choose the electric chair," Workman said.

"They are saying in this report that a lot [of prisoners] have suffered, they wouldn't be able to speak. You can't move to say anything. You're frozen."