Final Meal

      Both No Seconds and The Last Meal Project are extraordinarily compelling websites. That being said, they both do some things better than the other. But in the end one clearly comes out on top as more compelling.
      The Last Meals Project does a good job of humanizing the convicts through showing a picture of the person along with their last meal. The creator is a little one-sided with their viewpoint in that they don't show the crime of the offender. One looks at the picture of Tim McVeigh and thinks, "poor guy, he ate two pints of ice cream before he was killed, the death penalty is unjust!"Little do they know, he killed 168 people in an act of terrorism against his own country. Sure, The Last Meals Project gets their point across that the death penalty is bad; but at what cost? Some uneducated person could look at the website and actually feel sympathy for one of the most despicable Americans to ever live.
      What "The Last Meals Project" lacks is what I love about "No Seconds". No Seconds tells what the person is convicted of. It lets one choose whether the death penalty was just or not. With some you can see that they may have been a little too liberal with the death penalty, but with some you can see that anything less than death would have been unjust.
      They both present the information on opposite ends of the spectrum. The Last Meals Project is a little more scary; it has a way of making you feel the pain of someone in prison with the dirty black and white mugshots, the crumpled paper, and the red lettering in old type writer font. The feel when browsing the sight is an eerie one without a doubt. Whereas when reading the No Seconds site, the attention isn't on old school prison stereotypes. The artist shows the plates on what appears to be picnic tables and other tables we might eat off of on any given day. He still uses the old type writer font to show the information, but the photograph is a little less somber. The artist does this on purpose; he tries to show how nice of a thing giving one a final meal is before we take their life. He feels that it is ironic the kind gesture we give to them before we make them pay the ultimate price.
      Both websites get across the point they are trying to convey, but one does a better job than the other. No Seconds is the clear winner in my eyes because it gives a full point of view while still getting its point across. The Last Meal Project was just a little too one sided in my opinion, it's hard to get a point across when the whole story isn't being told.