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Receipts have been around as long as the written word. In fact, some historians argue that writing arose from the need to document financial transactions. Clay tablets tell us, in Cuneiform, that in 3200 B.C.E. Mesopotamia, people bought sheep, cows, and jars of honey. Small pieces of thermal paper tell us that today people buy onion rings, pecan pie, and steak calzones. Receipts have always born testimony to daily life. But while that testimony seems to simply chronicle social, legal, and economic transactions, embedded in its banality are deeper, messier, human stories.

Each of the fourteen receipts in this collection document the purchase of a death row inmate’s last meal “special request,” an option for inmates in Georgia who do not want the prison’s standard “in house” last meal of “chicken and rice, rutabagas, seasoned turnip greens, dry white beans, cornbread, bread pudding and fruit punch.” Special requests for last meals initiate a sequence of tasks: order processing, email approvals, and, ultimately, a mundane errand carried out by a human being. These receipts are evidence of the powerful, often invisible administrative infrastructure shepherding commerce and law; the anonymous back offices spinning with clerical duties. The receipts provide granular paper trails of commutes to fast food restaurants and minutes sitting in drive-thru lanes; of $0 tips; of the names of store managers and servers and cashiers unknowingly involved in serving someone their last meal. The receipts reveal the fingerprints of bureaucracy— prison employees’ handwritten notes, a wonky staple. The receipts generate questions; “Dine-In”?

Each inmate represented in this collection received their meal at approximately 4 p.m. and was executed at 7 p.m., with the exception of Keith Leroy Tharpe, whose execution was stayed by the Supreme Court at 10:31 p.m., six and a half hours after his last meal. On January 24, 2020, while his execution was being rescheduled, Mr. Tharpe died from cancer.

The Georgia Department of Corrections provided the receipts pursuant to the Open Records Act.