COLUMBIA, S.C. — Long a method of execution associated with political terror or military justice, a firing squad is set to kill a South Carolina inmate on Friday, the second time the state will have carried out that method in the past five weeks.
Mikal Mahdi was sentenced to die 20 years ago for the ambush killing of an off-duty police officer. He will be 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 the death penalty.
Mahdi, 42, chose to die by three bullets to the heart instead of lethal injection or the electric chair. On March 7, Brad Sigmon was executed in the first U.S. firing squad death in 15 years and only 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. Death in a hail of bullets 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 way to kill an inmate, especially with the uncertainty in obtaining lethal injection drugs.
Mahdi will be 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.
At 6 p.m. Friday, the curtain will open in the death chamber at a Columbia prison with fewer than a dozen witnesses sitting behind bulletproof glass.
Mahdi will be strapped into a chair. A white square with a red bull’s-eye will be over his heart, placed by a doctor with a stethoscope. His lawyer can read Mahdi’s final statement if he has one. A prison employee will then place a hood over Mahdi’s head, walk across the small room and pull open a black shade where the prison employees who volunteered for the firing squad will be stationed.
Without an audible or visual warning to witnesses, the shooters will fire high-powered rifles at Mahdi from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away, about the distance from a basketball backboard to the free-throw line. They all will have live bullets that shatter and splinter when they hit something firm, like a rib cage.
A doctor will then come out within a minute or two, examine Mahdi and declare him dead.
Mahdi admitted he killed 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.
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.
Mahdi’s final appeal was rejected this week by the South Carolina Supreme Court. His lawyers said Mahdi’s original attorneys put on a shallow case trying to spare his life that didn’t 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 uses 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.
Mahdi then sent his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has not ruled.
Mahdi’s death is the end of a busy time in South Carolina’s death chamber. He will be 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.
South Carolina now has 28 inmates on its death row. Just one man has been sentenced to death in the past decade.
