Gene Hathorn, a convicted murderer on Death Row in Texas, is planning an unconventional way to dispose of his corpse. Instead of a standard burial – “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” - Hathorn is hoping to transform himself into fish food.

Hathorn is awaiting the outcome of his third and final appeal at the Court of Criminal Appeals. If this appeal fails, he says he wants his body to be given to the artist Marco Evaristti for use in a piece of installation art in a project on capital punishment. Hathorn wants the artist to deep-freeze his executed corpse and then turn it into fish food, which visitors at an exhibition could then feed to goldfish.

In 1985, in Trinity County in Texas, Hathorn was convicted of killing his father, stepmother and stepbrother. Mr Evaristti, a Chilean artist living in Denmark, visited him in jail for the first time earlier this year, when the fish food plan was devised.

Evaristti presents his felon-into-food idea as part of a serious moral indictment of the system of capital punishment (as opposed to a daft and artless stunt). He says that more important than the story of Hathorn is the need to highlight America’s “vulgar and primitive” system of capital punishment.

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But not everyone will be convinced by Evaristti’s values and ,in particular, his claimed aversion to vulgarity. At an exhibition in Copenhagen in 2000, one of his installations was removed by police under Danish law. The exhibit featured a row of transparent electric food blenders, plugged in to sockets ready for action. Evaristti had filled each of them with water and live goldfish and visitors were invited to switch on the blenders to produce fish soup.

Historically, under English law no convict’s body has ever been specifically turned into fish food but some executed criminals did, in The Godfather phrase, end up “sleeping with the fishes”. It was the early medieval practice of various coastal towns such as Portsmouth and Sandwich Bay to execute convicts who been sentenced to death by tying them to a stake on the shore at low tide and leaving them there to drown.

Convicts in London managed to escape execution by consenting to their bodies being used for medical experiments. When John Benham was under sentence of death in the eighteenth-century, he gained a pardon from George III in exchange for agreeing to have a limb amputated. Surgeons wanted to test how good a newly-invented styptic was at stemming severe blood loss. The styptic must have been reasonably good because the records show that following the amputation Benham was later released from jail. It is always good to see law helping with the cutting edge of medical science.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University

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