April 11 (UPI) — South Carolina prison officials will put a man to death by firing squad for the second time in just over a month when they execute Mikal Mahdi on Friday at the Broad River Correctional Institute in Columbia, S.C.
Mahdi, 42, was convicted of the 2004 murder of off-duty Orangeburg Public Safety Capt. James Myers.
Mahdi’s execution is scheduled to take place at 3 p.m. EDT, when he will be strapped to a metal chair while wearing a hood and three corrections staff will shoot him in the heart simultaneously using rifles.
In early March, the South Carolina Department of Corrections executed Brad Sigmon by firing squad, marking the first-ever execution by that method in the state and the fifth overall since the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed the practice in 1976.
Sigmon’s death was the first firing squad execution in the United States in 15 years. The other three have all occurred in Utah.
In early March, the South Carolina Department of Corrections executed Brad Sigmon by firing squad, marking the first-ever execution by that method in the state and the fifth overall since the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed the practice in 1976. File Photo courtesy of the South Carolina Department of Corrections
Idaho in 2023 became the latest state to allow firing squads, joining Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah. Florida has signaled it could also soon allow the practice.
Should Mahdi’s execution be carried out Friday, he would become the third inmate to be put to death in South Carolina this year and the 12th in the United States.
Mahdi was 21 when he shot and killed Myers, in July 2004. Court records state he waited on the law enforcement officer’s property in Calhoun County, S.C., with a rifle for him to return. He then burned his body and stole several firearms.
At the time, police were looking for Mahdi for another shooting death in the area as well as an armed robbery and carjacking.
Mahdi chose the firing squad option over lethal injection or the electric chair, South Carolina’s two other execution methods.
Mahdi’s legal team earlier in the week filed a clemency request Gov. Henry McMaster, R-S.C.
“If the execution goes through, they’re going to fire three high-powered rifles at our client’s chest,” Mahdi’s lawyer David Weiss told Fox News Digital in an interview.
“It’s a horrible thing for him to go through. It’s a horrible thing to have to witness for everybody involved, from the legal team to witnesses to prison staff who have to carry it out.”
Weiss said he and Mahdi viewed the electric chair as being “cook[ed] from the inside out,” while calling the lethal injection method “quite torturous.”
During the execution, the inmate is strapped to the chair in the facility’s death chamber, housing the electric chair which cannot be removed, according to prison officials. A target is then strapped over their heart. The three corrections staff that volunteer for the duty then fire rifles simultaneously from behind a wall and the inmate is declared dead.
As with other execution methods, witnesses sit in an adjacent room and watch through protective glass until the procedure is over.
“It’s a difficult sight to reconcile in real-time. You’re watching it happening. You’re thinking, I just saw a hole open up in that person,” lawyer Bo King, who represented Sigmon and was present at his execution in March, told Fox News Digital.
“The amount of damage that I saw done to Brad’s body is beyond anything that I would consider.”
