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But a new study offers evidence that the last meal provides a last chance for a person who feels he or she has been unjustly condemned to show innocence.

Researchers Kevin M. Kniffin and Brian Wansink of Cornell University have looked at the last meals requested -- or rejected -- by 247 persons who were executed in the United States between 2002 and 2006 and found that those who maintained their innocence to the very end were far more likely to reject the meal than prisoners who had accepted their guilt.

"Those who denied guilt were 2.7 times as likely to decline a last meal than people who admitted guilt (29 percent versus 8 percent,)" they conclude in their study, published in the journal Laws.

Prisoners who were "at peace" with their sentence, as the researchers put it, asked for 34 percent more calories than those who insisted they were innocent, and the "innocents" asked for "significantly fewer brand-name food items."

The researchers see the declination of a last meal as an opportunity for a prisoner who thinks the conviction was wrong to tell the executioner to, well, shove it.

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