South Carolina death row inmates on Friday chose to execute by firing the squad just five weeks after the state committed his first death from a bullet.
Mikal Mahdi, who pleaded guilty to the murder of a police officer in 2004, is scheduled to be executed on April 11th.
Mahdi, 41, had the option to fire a squad and die by firing a deadly injection or an electric chair. He will become the first prisoner in the state to be executed as Brad Sigmon chose to be shot dead on March 7th. The doctor asserted that Sigmon had died within three minutes of a third round torn in his heart.
“Faced with wild bars and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi chose three less evils,” one of his lawyers, David Weiss, said in a statement. “Michal chose the shooting squad rather than being burned and cut off in an electric chair or carrying a prolonged death with a fatal injection gurney.”
Mahdi ambushed Orangeburg Public Sheriff James Myers in July 2004 at an officer's shed in Calhoun County. Myers just returned from an out-of-town birthday celebration for his wife, sisters and daughter, prosecutors said.
Myers' wife found his burning body and was shot at least eight times in her head, including two, in the shed 15 months ago, in the backdrop of her wedding, authorities said.
Mahdi is tied to a 15-foot (4.6 meters) chair by three prison employees volunteering to board the shooting squad. The target is placed on your chest. All of their rifles are equipped with live rounds that crush them when they hit his rib cage.
With the exception of Sigmon, only three other US prisoners (all Utah) have been killed by fire forces over the past 50 years. Sigmon was the first inmate in the United States to be killed by a bullet since 2010.
Mahdi's lawyer filed a final appeal with the state's Supreme Court and said that Mahdi's case, a life sentence at the original trial, took only 30 minutes and that his lawyer did not call anyone who could testify on his behalf.
It was “just over the length of the Law and Order episodes and was just as superficial,” they said.
Several defense organizations have submitted briefs that no one should be executed after such a small effort to protect them.
Mahdi's lawyer said that the boy Mahdi spent several months in quarantine in prison, which changed his developing brain and influenced his judgment.
After Mahdi pleaded guilty to the murder, Judge Clifton Newman said he sentenced the young man to death because the human senses he had tried to find in all the defendants seemed to be out of existence in Mahdi.
Prosecutors responded to poor defense claims, saying that Mahdi was able to present more evidence during the 2011 appeal, when Mahdi had to listen to inside the prison after stabbing the death line guard in an attempt to escape. The judge refused to appeal.
“In Mahdi's slang, if his mitigation presentation before Judge Newman “is not even the length of the law and order episode,” “the review of potential errors is the 24th season,” the state attorney general's office wrote in court documents.
Prosecutors said much of the new evidence would be useful in Mahdi's case, including a series of attacks and threats against prison employees. His guilty plea for killing a convenience store clerk in Winston-Salem, North Carolina before South Carolina was killed. And the deaths of two other people Virginia officials believe he is connected.
“The nature of a man is violence,” the prosecutor wrote.
There is another opportunity to live in Mahdi. He can ask Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to reduce his prison sentence minutes before the scheduled execution at Broad River Correctional Facility in Columbia at 6pm on April 11th.
However, since the death penalty was resumed in the United States in 1976, the governor of South Carolina has not provided tolerance for the state's 47 executions.
For the past seven months, South Carolina executed Freddie Owens on September 20th. Richard Moore on November 1st. Marion Bowman Jr. on January 31st. and Sigmon.
