South Carolina executes second man by firing squad in 5 weeks
[April 12, 2025]
By JEFFREY COLLINS
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A firing squad on Friday executed a South Carolina
man who killed an off-duty police officer, the second time the rare
execution method has been used by the state in the past five weeks.
Mikal Mahdi gave no final statement and did not look to his right toward
the nine witnesses in the room behind bulletproof glass and bars once
the curtain opened.
He took a few deep breaths during the 45 seconds between when the hood
was put over his head and when the shots rang out, fired by three
volunteers who are prison employees at a distance of about 15 feet (4.6
meters).
Mahdi, 42, cried out as the bullets hit him, and his arms flexed. A
white target with the red bull’s-eye over his heart was pushed into the
wound in his chest.
Mahdi groaned two more times about 45 seconds after that. His breaths
continued for about 80 seconds before he appeared to take one final
gasp.
A doctor checked him for a little over a minute, and he was declared
dead at 6:05 p.m., less than four minutes after the shots were fired.
Firing squad executions resume
Mahdi's execution came a little over a month after Brad Sigmon was put
to death March 7, in the first U.S. firing squad death in 15 years and
the fourth since 1976. The others all occurred in Utah.
The firing squad is an execution method with a long and violent history
around the world. It has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in
armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West and as a tool of
terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi
Germany.
But South Carolina lawmakers saw it as the quickest and most humane
method, especially with the uncertainty in obtaining lethal injection
drugs.
In a statement Mahdi’s attorney, assistant federal public defender David
Weiss, called the execution a “horrifying act that belongs in the
darkest chapters of history, not in a civilized society.”
Mahdi had the choice of dying by firing squad, lethal injection or the
electric chair.
“Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi has chosen the
lesser of three evils,” Weiss said. “Mikal chose the firing squad
instead of being burned and mutilated in the electric chair, or
suffering a lingering death on the lethal injection gurney.”
Mahdi is the fifth inmate executed by South Carolina in less than eight
months as the state makes its way through prisoners who ran out of
appeals during an unintended 13-year pause on executions in the state.
Mahdi's is the 12th execution in the U.S. this year. Twenty-five
prisoners in nine states were killed in all of 2024. Alabama and
Louisiana have killed inmates by nitrogen gas. Florida, Oklahoma,
Arizona and Texas have executed men by lethal injection, while South
Carolina has used both the firing squad and lethal injection.
Mahdi's last meal was ribeye steak cooked medium, mushroom risotto,
broccoli, collard greens, cheesecake and sweet tea, prison officials
said.
The crime
Mahdi admitted killing Orangeburg Public Safety officer James Myers in
2004, shooting him at least eight times before burning his body. Myers’
wife found him in the couple's Calhoun County shed, which had been the
backdrop to their wedding 15 months earlier.
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South Carolina execution protestors demonstrate outside the
scheduled execution of South Carolina inmate Mikal Mahdi in
Columbia, S.C., Friday, April 11, 2025. (AP Photo/David Yeazell)
Myers’ shed was a short distance through the woods from a gas
station where Mahdi tried but failed to buy gas with a stolen credit
card and left behind a vehicle he had carjacked in Columbia. Mahdi
was arrested in Florida while driving Myers’ unmarked police pickup
truck.
Mahdi also admitted to the killing three days earlier of Christopher
Boggs, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, convenience store clerk who
was shot twice in the head as he checked Mahdi’s ID. Mahdi was
sentenced to life in prison for that killing.
Final appeal
Mahdi's final appeal was rejected this week by both the U.S. and
South Carolina Supreme Courts. His lawyers said Mahdi's original
attorneys put on a shallow case trying to spare his life that did
not call on relatives, teachers or others who knew him and ignored
the impact of months spent in solitary confinement in prison as a
teen.
The defense’s case to spare Mahdi’s life before a judge lasted only
about 30 minutes. It “didn’t even span the length of a Law & Order
episode, and was just as superficial,” Mahdi’s lawyers wrote.
Mahdi's earliest memory was his father slamming his mother through a
glass table and later lying to his son and saying his mother was
dead. Mahdi's father pulled him out of school in fifth grade when
officials suggested he needed behavioral help, defense lawyers said.
Prosecutors said Mahdi constantly used brutality to solve his
problems. As a death row prisoner, he stabbed a guard and hit
another worker with a concrete block. Mahdi was caught three times
with tools he could have used to escape, including a piece of
sharpened metal that could be used as a knife, according to prison
records.
“The nature of the man is violence,” prosecutors wrote.
Weiss, Mahdi’s attorney, said his client died in full view of a
system “that failed him at every turn — from childhood to his final
breath.”
Busy death chamber
Mahdi's death is the end of a busy time in South Carolina's death
chamber. He is the fifth inmate killed since September after the
state had not had any executions since 2011. No other inmates are
out of appeals but several are close.
The state was able to restart executions after lawmakers allowed the
firing squad and passed a bill allowing suppliers of the
pentobarbital to remain secret, along with the exact procedures used
to kill inmates and the names of prison employees on execution
teams, including the firing squad shooters.
Along with Sigmon's firing squad death last month, three other South
Carolina prisoners have been executed via lethal injection since
September.
The state now has 26 inmates on its death row. Just one man has been
sentenced to death in the past decade.
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