Taylor Parker is one of six women currently sitting on death row in Texas, convicted of one of the most disturbing crimes in recent American history. When her execution date is eventually set, she will face lethal injection without the comfort of choosing her final meal. That particular privilege was stripped from every Texas death row inmate over a decade ago, and the man responsible was not even trying to make a point. He just was not hungry.
Parker was convicted of capital murder in October 2022 and sentenced to death the following month, after a jury in Bowie County found her guilty of killing 21-year-old Reagan Simmons-Hancock, who was 35 weeks pregnant at the time of her death in October 2020. A judge concluded that Parker's crimes were elaborately premeditated, the product of months of planning. The Supreme Court declined to review her case in May 2026. No execution date has been set.
The Netflix documentary Maternal Instinct, released in June 2026, brought renewed attention to the case and to Parker herself, who faked a pregnancy for nine months, wearing a prosthetic bump, attending a gender reveal party, and deceiving her partner, her family and those around her before carrying out the attack.
But it is a different aspect of her story that has resurfaced online this week: the fact that Parker will never get to choose what she eats before she dies.
The tradition of the chosen final meal stretched back 87 years in Texas before it was abolished in 2011. The decision to end it came down to one man, Lawrence Russell Brewer, a white supremacist who had been convicted alongside three others for the brutal murder of James Byrd Jr., an African American man who was tied to a pick-up truck and dragged for three miles along a road in 1998 in one of the most horrific hate crimes in modern American history.
Brewer was executed by lethal injection in September 2011. Before his death, he submitted a final meal request that was, by any measure, extraordinary. He asked for two chicken steaks smothered in gravy with sliced onions, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, a cheese omelette with ground beef, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and jalapenos, a bowl of fried okra with ketchup, three fajitas, a pound of barbecue with half a loaf of white bread, a meat lover's pizza, a pint of homemade vanilla Blue Bell ice cream, a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts, and three root beers.
Officers sourced the food. It was prepared and delivered to him. And then Brewer looked at it and announced that he was not hungry. He did not eat a single bite of any of it.
Texas state senator John Whitmire was furious. He contacted the Texas Department of Criminal Justice the same day and demanded the tradition be scrapped. The department agreed, and since September 2011, no death row inmate in Texas has been permitted to choose a special final meal. They receive the same meal as every other prisoner that day.
It is a piece of American legal history that originated entirely from one man's decision to order a feast and then do nothing with it. And it is the reason that when Taylor Parker's execution eventually takes place, the last thing she eats will not be her choice.
