There’s been several articles and rumors saying a Texas death row inmate requested or ate an African child as his last meal. They’re all fake.
The original one was posted on a Belgian satirical website before it was translated to English and published on other fake news sites.
But there’s another one going around from Hip-Hop Hangover, which posts fake news.
“Stephen K. Walker, French M. Robertson Unit inmate in Abilene, Texas, is on death row for murder and cannibalism of the 2006 case that sentenced him to death,” it says. “When asked what he would want his final meal to be, he said with no hesitation, ”A little boy.”
It adds :“The Department of Corrections are supposed to accept all the demands of any kind. So it was initially thought that they were buying a corpse in a morgue to satisfy the desires of Stephen Walker. But tables turned when it was said that they were trying to find a toddler from a third world country and buy him/her alive within a budget of $25,000.”
According to Snopes, a hoax-debunking website, there’s been fake reports about this in the past.
“The article relies on a common misconception: that last meal requests, no matter how difficult or implausible they may be, must be honored. As we noted in a recent, similar article, this is simply not the case. Not only is there no law mandating last meal requests be honored by prison officials, the practice is a rapidly-dying courtesy that is not always extended to condemned prisoners (and has already been eliminated in the state of Texas),” the site says.
The original Belgian article says that a man named Doug Stephener
“If the sheer ridiculousness of this item’s premise isn’t sufficiently self-debunking, then we offer as negative proof the fact that according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, no one named Doug Stephener (or Stephen K. Walker) has been, or is about to be, executed in the state of Texas,” Snopes also says.
