A prison firing squad in South Carolina executed Mikal Mahdi on Friday, the second recent death row killing in the state by authorized gunfire.
Mahdi, 42, was shot dead by corrections employees inside the execution chamber, where authorities have carried out a rapid spree of killings as South Carolina aggressively revives capital punishment.
Mahdi was sentenced to death for the 2004 killing of James Myers, a 56-year-old off-duty public safety officer. His attorneys fought in recent days to block the execution, arguing he had suffered significant abuse and torture in his childhood and had been denied a fair trial, but the state courts and US supreme court rejected the final petitions.
South Carolina’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, announced minutes before Mahdi’s execution that he would not be commuting Mahdi’s sentence. No governor in the state has granted clemency to a death row defendant in the last 50 years of the modern death penalty era.
The state resumed executions last year after a 13-year pause caused by its inability to procure lethal injection supplies. Officials now direct people on death row to choose their method of killing – either electric chair, lethal injection or firing squad. Mahdi’s lawyers said he selected the “lesser of three evils” and opted to be shot instead of “burned and mutilated in the electric chair, or suffering a lingering death on the lethal injection gurney”.
The state’s firing squad protocols called for Mahdi to be strapped to a chair and shot by three prison employees aiming at a bullseye placed on his chest. Mahdi gave no final statement and did not look toward the witnesses in the room, which included his lawyer.
Mahdi cried out when he was shot, his arms flexed, and he groaned two more times roughly 45 seconds after the bullets were fired, according to an Associated Press reporter, who served as a media witness. His breaths continued for roughly 80 seconds before he appeared to take a final gasp. He was pronounced dead around 6.05pm, less than four minutes after he was shot.
“Mikal Mahdi was a smart, creative, intellectually curious person who could have done so much more with his life. He just never got the chance,” his lawyer, David Weiss, said in a statement on Friday evening. “Tonight, the state of South Carolina executed him by firing squad – a horrifying act that belongs in the darkest chapters of history, not in a civilized society … We love Mikal and will miss him deeply.”
Unlike the state’s first execution last year of a man who presented evidence of his innocence in his final days, Mahdi’s lawyers have not disputed his conviction or the facts of his case.
His attorneys argued his constitutional rights had been violated and that he should not have been sentenced to death, documenting an upbringing of violence and neglect in a US supreme court petition.
Some of Mahdi’s earliest memories were of his father abusing his mother, who fled when he was four, and by age nine he was suicidal and briefly committed to a psychiatric facility. He did not get further treatment, and was homeschooled by his father who embraced conspiracy theories, the petition said. Mahdi entered the prison system as a young teen.
Between ages 14 and 21, Mahdi spent an estimated total of 8,000 hours in solitary confinement while incarcerated, enduring prolonged isolation in conditions now widely regarded as torture, his attorneys said.
At age 21, two months after a release from prison, he committed a series of violent crimes, including robbing a convenience store, fatally shooting the clerk, fleeing police and breaking into a shed at Myers’s home and killing him.
Mahdi pleaded guilty, but his trial lawyers failed to properly advocate for him at sentencing, his attorneys argued. While prosecutors called 28 witnesses, Mahdi’s attorneys at the time called two individuals, only one of whom offered minimal testimony on Mahdi’s history of trauma.
The judge did not learn about instances of extreme violence committed by his father, Mahdi’s severe mental health crises at a young age, or that he had spent the vast majority of his teenage years imprisoned without getting necessary treatment, often languishing in solitary, his lawyers said.
After Mahdi’s trial counsels presented “barely half an hour” of “mitigating evidence”, the judge sentenced him to death, saying Mahdi lacked “humanity” and that it didn’t seem as if his “turbulent and transient childhood … contributed in any significant way” to the crimes.
The South Carolina attorney general’s office argued Mahdi had exhausted his appeals and that his claims of ineffectual counsel had already been litigated.
“Mikal died in full view of the system that failed him at every turn – from childhood to his final breath … Mikal’s life was a testament to systemic neglect, and his death was its final, cruel punctuation mark,” said Weiss, an assistant federal public defender. “We condemn the violence done to him as a child, as an adolescent in prison, and as an adult. Mikal’s story of abuse and neglect by the state is sadly not unique – but for the state to condemn a man who they broke as a child is not only a tragedy, it’s a collective failure of empathy by our society and by our entire system of justice.”
On death row, Mahdi had spent time reading history and nonfiction and trying to learn Spanish by watching Telemundo, Weiss told the Guardian in an earlier interview. In his final days, he had also asked to have his organs donated after his death, but his attorneys were told healthcare protocols would bar the donations.
Anti-death-penalty advocates held vigils this week calling for McMaster to grant clemency, and two of Mahdi’s elementary school teachers also publicly urged for his life to be spared.
Mahdi is the 12th person executed this year so far. His killing comes one month after South Carolina shot dead 67-year-old Brad Sigmon, who was the first person executed by firing squad in the US in 15 years. There have only been three other firing squad executions under the contemporary death penalty, all in Utah, but Idaho recently passed a law to make shooting the primary execution method in the state. Last month, Louisiana carried out a rare execution using nitrogen gas, an experimental method banned under state law for euthanizing dogs and cats.
South Carolina has executed five people in the last seven months and continues to face scrutiny over the secrecy of its methods and the brutal conditions men face on death row.
