A man sentenced to death for the murder of a police officer and a store clerk has decided on an unusual method for his execution.
Mikal Mahdi, a death row inmate from South Carolina, is set to be executed on April 11, pending any further appeals for his sentence. The 41-year-old convict has been granted one final opportunity to contest his death penalty.
Just prior to his scheduled execution at Columbia’s Broad River Correctional Institution, Mahdi has the option to request clemency from Republican Governor Henry McMaster, aiming for a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
However, according to CNN, no South Carolina governor has granted clemency in any of the 47 executions since the death penalty was reintroduced in 1976.
In July 2004, Mahdi, then 21 years old, began his series of crimes in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, by killing a 29-year-old convenience store clerk, Christopher Jason Boggs, during a failed robbery.
Two days following this incident, Mahdi carjacked an individual in Columbia, South Carolina, and drove to a farm in Calhoun County, where he encountered 56-year-old off-duty police officer James Myers.
Mahdi shot Myers up to eight times, including twice in the head, then attempted to set Myers’ body on fire with diesel fuel.
Myers had recently returned from a birthday celebration out of town with his family.
It was Myers’ wife who discovered his charred body in their shed, the same place where they were married just 15 months earlier, as reported by the police.
Mahdi’s attorney has now commented on his client’s decision to opt for a firing squad as the method of execution.
“Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi has chosen the lesser of three evils,” said attorney David Weiss in a statement to AP.
“Mikal chose the firing squad instead of being burned and mutilated in the electric chair, or suffering a lingering death on the lethal injection gurney.”
If the execution proceeds, Mahdi will be the fifth inmate to die by firing squad since 1976 and the second in just over a month, following Brad Sigmon’s execution on March 7.
Witnesses of Sigmon’s execution reported that three state corrections department volunteers each fired a round of 100-grain TAP Urban bullets from .308-caliber Winchester rifles.
Sigmon, dressed in a black jumpsuit with a hood and a target over his heart, was shot while strapped to a metal chair placed over a catch basin.
At 6:05 pm, the volunteers, positioned 15 feet away and concealed from the viewing area, carried out the execution. A doctor examined Sigmon for approximately a minute and a half before pronouncing him dead at 6:08 pm.