South Carolina will execute a man by firing squad for the second time in two months on Friday, when Mikal Mahdi is scheduled to die.
Before Brad Sigmon was executed at a state prison in Columbia on March 7, only one person had been executed by firing squad in the U.S. in the prior 15 years — Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010 in Utah.
Mahdi, 41, chose the firing squad over lethal injection or the electric chair. South Carolina is one of five states that allows condemned prisoners to die by firing squad.
On July 18, 2004, Mahdi snuck into a shed near the Calhoun County home of James Myers, a 56-year-old member of the Orangeburg Public Safety Department. When Myers returned home, Mahdi shot him nine times and torched his body. He was captured three days later and confessed to the crime.
“I’m guilty as hell,” Mahdi wrote in a letter shared by his lawyers. “What I’ve done is irredeemable.”
Days before the murder of Myers, Mahdi also fatally shot a store clerk, Christopher Biggs, in Winston-Salem, N.C. He was sentenced to life in prison for Biggs’ murder.
After the state’s top court rejected Mahdi’s last appeal on Monday, only South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster can stop Mahdi’s scheduled execution. McMaster, a Republican, has declined to halt any executions while in office.
With News Wire Services
