Columbia, SC – For a long time an execution method associated with political terror or military justice, a squadron He is ready to kill an South Carolina inmate on Friday, the second time that the State will have carried out that method in the last five weeks.
Mikik Mahdi He was sentenced to die 20 years ago for the murder of ambush of a police officer out of service. It will be the fifth registration executed by South Carolina in less than eight months as the State makes its way through the prisoners who were left without appeals during a 13 -year involuntary pause on the death penalty.
Mahdi, 42, chose to die for three bullets to the heart instead of lethal injection or the electric chair. March 7, Brad Sigmon He was executed in the first US farewell squad. UU. In 15 years and only in the room since 1976. The others occurred in Utah.
The shooting squad is a execution method with a Long and violent history Around the world. Death in a bullet hail has been used to punish riots and dropout in armies, such as border justice in the old west of the United States and as a tool of horror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
But the legislators of South Carolina saw it as the fastest and most human way of killing an inmate, especially with uncertainty in obtaining lethal injection drugs.
Mahdi will be the twelfth execution in the United States this year. Twenty -five prisoners in nine states were killed in all 2024. Alabama and Louisiana They have killed inmates by nitrogen gas. Florida, Oklahola, Arizona and Texas They have executed men by lethal injection, while South Carolina has used so much squadron and lethal injection.
At 6 pm on Friday, the curtain will open in the death chamber in a Columbia prison with less than a dozen witnesses sitting behind bulletproof glass.
mahdi It will be tied to a chair. A white square with a red bull eye will be on your heart, placed by a doctor with a stethoscope. Your lawyer can read Mahdi’s final statement if you have one. Then, a prison employee will place a hood on Mahdi’s head, will cross the small room and open a black tone where prison employees who were offered as volunteers for the farewell squad will be parked.
Without an audible or visual warning to the witnesses, the shooters will shoot high power rifles in MAHDI from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away, to the distance from a basketball board to the free throw line. Everyone will have live bullets that break and divide when they hit something firm, like a rib cage.
A doctor will leave in a minute or two, examine Mahdi and declare him dead.
Mahdi admitted that he killed the Public Security officer of Orangeburg, James Myers, in 2004, shooting at least eight times before burn his body. Myers’s wife found him in the couple’s Callon County, which had been the wedding backdrop 15 months before.
Myers’ shed was at a short distance through the forest from a service station where Mahdi tried but could not buy gasoline with a stolen credit card and left a vehicle that had stolen in Columbia. Mahdi was arrested in Florida while driving the un scoring police truck from Myers.
Mahdi also admitted the murder three days before Christopher Boggs, an employee of the Winston-Salem convenience store, North Carolina, who was shot twice in the head while reviewing the identification of Mahdi. Mahdi was sentenced to life imprisonment for that murder.
Mahdi’s final appeal He was rejected This week by the Supreme Court of South Carolina. His lawyers said that Mahdi’s original lawyers made a superficial case that attempted forgiving his life that did not call relatives, teachers or others who knew him and ignored the impact of the months after lonely confinement in prison when he was a teenager.
The case of defense to avoid Mahdi’s life before a judge lasts only about 30 minutes. “He didn’t even cover the length of a law AND Order episodeAnd it was equally superficial, “Mahdi’s lawyers wrote.
Mahdi’s first memory was his father hitting his mother through a glass table and then lying to his son and telling him that his mother was dead. Mahdi’s father took him out of the school in fifth grade when the officials suggested that he needed behavior, they said defense lawyers.
Prosecutors said Mahdi constantly use brutality to solve their problems. As a prisoner of the death corridor, he stabbed one guard and hit another worker with a concrete block. Mahdi was caught three times with tools that it could have used to escape, including a piece of sharp metal that could be used as a knife, according to prison records.
“The nature of man is violence,” prosecutors wrote.
Mahdi then sent his appeal to the United States Supreme Court, which has not governed.
Mahdi’s death is the end of a time busy in the death chamber of South Carolina. It will be the fifth stubbornly murdered after the State has not had executions since 2011. No other inmate is not appeal, but several are close.
The State was able to restart executions after the legislators allowed the execution squad and approved a bill that allowed the pentobarbital suppliers to remain secret, together with the exact procedures used to kill inmates and names of the prison employees in the execution equipment, including the shooting squadrons.
Along with Sigmon’s Floring Squad Death last month, three other prisoners of South Carolina have been executed by lethal injection since September.
South Carolina now has 28 inmates in his death corridor. Only a man has been sentenced to death in the last decade.
