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USA Today
11-04-2025
- USA Today
A firing squad is set to execute South Carolina inmate Mikal Mahdi today. What to know.
A firing squad is set to execute South Carolina inmate Mikal Mahdi today. What to know. Show Caption Hide Caption The history of firing squad executions in the US Firing squad executions have a long history and are receiving renewed attention with recent inmates choosing firing squads as their execution method. Mahdi was convicted of the 2004 killing of 56-year-old Capt. James Myers, an off-duty Orangeburg Public Safety officer and beloved father Mahdi will sit restrained in a metal chair and a hood will be over his head when three volunteer corrections staff shoot a target over his heart. Five states − South Carolina, Mississippi, Utah, Oklahoma and Idaho − have legalized firing squads as an execution method but Mahdi's will only be the fifth such execution since 1977. A firing squad in South Carolina is set to execute a death row inmate who ambushed an off-duty police officer, shot him nine times and set him on fire. Under the state's execution protocols, the firing squad will put a hood over 42-year-old Mikal Mahdi's head and shoot him in the heart simultaneously with three bullets on Friday. It will be the second such execution in the state this year but only the fifth in the U.S. since 1977. South Carolina carried out the firing squad execution execution of Brad Keith Sigmon last month in what was the first execution to use the method in the country in 15 years. Mahdi was convicted of the 2004 killing of 56-year-old Capt. James Myers, an off-duty Orangeburg Public Safety officer who was killed at the same spot on his farm property where he and his wife got married. She was the one to find his body. "His heart and mind are full of hate and malice," prosecutor David Pascoe told jurors during Mahdi's trial, according to an archived story in The Times and Democrat. "(He's) the epitome of evil." Mahdi's attorneys have been arguing that he should be spared because he never got the mental health care he "desperately needed" as a child who repeatedly threatened suicide and endured "extraordinary abuse and trauma." If Mahdi's execution moves forward, he will become the 12th inmate executed in the U.S. this year and the third in South Carolina. Here's what you need to know about the execution. When and where will Mikal Mahdi be executed? Mahdi is set to be executed just after 6 p.m. ET on Friday at the Broad River Correctional Institute in Columbia, South Carolina. Stories of justice and action across the country: Sign up for USA TODAY's This is America newsletter. How will Mikal Mahdi be executed? Mahdi will sit restrained in a metal chair, a hood over his head, in the corner of a room shared by the state's electric chair, "which can't be moved," according to the South Carolina Department of Corrections' execution protocols provided to USA TODAY. The firing squad team − three voluntary corrections staff − will stand behind a wall with loaded rifles 15 feet from Mahdi. The wall will have an opening for the weapons. "A small aim point will be placed over his heart by a member of the execution team," the department said. "After the warden reads the execution order, the team will fire ... After the inmate is declared dead, the curtain will be drawn and witnesses escorted out." Witnesses to the execution, which typically involve family members of both the inmate and victim, members of the news media, attorneys and prison staff, "will see the right-side profile of the inmate." The department said that bullet-resistant glass has been installed between the death chamber and the witness room. Capt. James Myers: Slain officer, new wife had big dreams on land where he was killed How common is the firing squad method? Five states − South Carolina, Mississippi, Utah, Oklahoma and Idaho − have legalized firing squads as an execution method, most recently Idaho in 2023. A new bill proposed in Florida could pave the way for firing squad executions in that state, as well. On March 7, South Carolina executed Brad Keith Sigmon by firing squad, the first execution in the U.S. using the method since 2010 and only the fourth since 1977. The previous three were all carried out in Utah. Firing squad executes Brad Keith Sigmon in South Carolina A firing squad in South Carolina executed Brad Keith Sigmon for the beating deaths of his ex-girlfriend's parents in 2001. Among the witnesses to Sigmon's execution was his attorney, Gerald 'Bo' King. "Brad's death was horrifying and violent," King said in a statement at the time. "It is unfathomable that, in 2025, South Carolina would execute one of its citizens in this bloody spectacle." David Weiss, Mahdi's attorney, said his client chose the firing squad for Friday's execution because it was "the lesser of three evils," saying he risked being "burned and mutilated" in an electric chair or "suffering a lingering death" by lethal injection. South Carolina has defended the constitutionality of all its execution methods. The state's Attorney General's Office does not comment on pending litigation. Why is Mikal Mahdi being executed? On July 14, 2004, Mahdi − then just 21 years old − began a crime spree that spanned four states and included two murders. Mahdi stole a neighbor's gun and station wagon in his home state of Virginia and headed to North Carolina, where he fatally shot gas station clerk Christopher Jason Boggs. Mahdi then went to South Carolina, carjacked a man in downtown Columbia and drove 35 minutes away to a Calhoun County gas station, where he spent at least 45 minutes struggling to get gas with a rejected credit card. A store clerk called police, prompting Mahdi to flee and ditch the car. Shortly after, Mahdi arrived at Myers' farm. Mahdi broke into Myers' shed, where he found guns and laid in wait for the 56-year-old, who had been at the beach that day celebrating the birthdays of his wife, sister and daughter, court records say. When Myers arrived at the shed, Mahdi attacked, shooting him nine times, pouring diesel fuel on his body and setting him on fire before stealing his police truck and multiple guns, court records say. "I found the love of my life, my soulmate, the partner that my life revolved around, lifeless, lying in a pool of blood and his body burned by someone who didn't even know him," Myers' wife, Amy Tripp Myers, testified through tears. "As I screamed those blood-curdling screams of pain and anguish, I instantly knew that the man with whom I had just spent the last six years of my life dreaming of a beautiful future was gone like a vapor." In a letter written by Mahdi and shared by his attorneys, the inmate wrote: "I'm guilty as hell ... What I've done is irredeemable." Who was Capt. James Myers? Born in the South Carolina city of Orangeburg, just southwest of Columbia, Myers − who went by Jim − began his career with the city's fire department in 1974 before he eventually became a police captain for the Orangeburg Public Safety Department, according to his obituary. As "an avid outdoorsman," the obituary continued, Myers loved fishing, hunting, scuba diving. As a treat for his 53rd birthday, Myers decided to buy a piece of farmland that he worked hard to make his own. In 2002, the day after Valentine's Day, Myers and Amy Tripp Myers were celebrating their new, elaborate shed on the property. "Jim and I looked at the newly raised walls of our shed, hugged each other and, like giddy children full of hope, scratched our names in the freshly poured concrete, just a few feet from the spot where Jim took his last breath," she testified at his trial, according to The Times and Democrat. "I died that night and haven't been the same person since." Who is Mikal Mahdi? As a child, Mahdi's attorneys say he suffered years of physical and emotional abuse and was suicidal by the age of 8. By 9, he was diagnosed with major depressive disorder, and when teachers tried to get him specialized help, his father pulled Mahdi out of the school system and "subjected him to several years of paranoid, survivalist 'home schooling,'" they wrote in court records. When he was 14, Mahdi first entered the juvenile justice system after being convicted of theft, and from then on, "spent most of the rest of his childhood in custody, often kept isolated and alone," they said. Between the ages of 14 and 17, he spent more than 75 days in solitary confinement, and spent about eight more months in solitary by the time he was 21, as well as being on suicide watch, his attorneys said. "Mikal desperately needed mental health care," his attorneys said in a news release. "Instead, he languished in juvenile prison, where he spent thousands of hours in solitary confinement. We now know that punitive isolation is deeply damaging to children." Mahdi's attorneys argued to the South Carolina Supreme Court that the judge who sentenced him to death knew almost nothing about Mahdi's troubled past, information that could have resulted in a lighter sentence. They have also criticized what they say was a weak defense at trial, arguing that Mahdi's attorneys at the time spent less than 30 minutes arguing against the death penalty. It "didn't even span the length of a 'Law & Order' episode and was just as superficial," they said. The South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously declined to spare Mahdi's life on Monday, allowing his execution to move forward. Mahdi's last hopes for a reprieve lie with the U.S. Supreme Court and Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster.
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Yahoo
South Carolina's highest court refuses to stop second firing squad execution
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina's highest court on Monday rejected the last major appeal from Mikal Mahdi, who is scheduled to die by firing squad later this week for the ambush killing of an off-duty police officer. Mahdi's lawyers said his original attorneys put on a shallow case trying to spare his life that didn't call on relatives, teachers or people who knew him and ignored the impact of weeks spent in solitary confinement in prison as a teen. But the state Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, ruled that many of those arguments were made in earlier unsuccessful appeals and refused to stop Friday's scheduled execution so further hearings could be held. Mahdi, who admitted killing an off-duty police officer in an ambush at the officer's Calhoun County shed, is the fifth person set to be executed in South Carolina in less than eight months. All made final appeals to the state Supreme Court but all were rejected. Mahdi has one more opportunity to live, by asking Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to reduce his sentence to life in prison without parole just minutes before his scheduled execution time. He is to be put to death with three bullets to the heart at 6 p.m. on April 11 at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. But no South Carolina governor has offered clemency in the 47 executions carried out in the state since the death penalty resumed in the U.S. in 1976. Mahdi, 41, was convicted of killing Orangeburg Public Safety officer James Myers in 2004, shooting him at least eight times, then burning his body. Myers' wife found him in the shed, which had been the backdrop to their wedding 15 months earlier. Myers' shed was a short distance through the woods from a gas station where Mahdi tried but failed to buy gas with a stolen credit card and left behind a vehicle he had carjacked in Columbia. Mahdi was arrested afterward in Florida while driving Myers' unmarked police pickup truck. Mahdi also admitted to the killing three days earlier of Christopher Biggs, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, convenience store clerk who was shot twice in the head as he checked Mahdi's ID. Mahdi was sentenced to life in prison for that killing. Mahdi pleaded guilty to killing Myers, leaving a judge under South Carolina law to decide if he would be sentenced to death or life without parole. Prosecutors called 28 witnesses for Circuit Court Judge Clifton Newman to hear. The defense called two, according to Mahdi's appeal. The defense's case to spare Mahdi's life lasted only about 30 minutes. It 'didn't even span the length of a Law & Order episode, and was just as superficial,' Mahdi's lawyers wrote. Prosecutors said Mahdi was able to present much more evidence during a 2011 appeal that had to be heard inside a prison because Mahdi had stabbed a death row guard during an escape attempt. A judge rejected the appeal. 'In Mahdi's vernacular, if his mitigation presentation before Judge Newman 'didn't even span the length of a Law & Order episode,' the review of any potential error is in its 24th season,' the state Attorney General's Office wrote in court papers. As a prisoner, Mahdi has been caught three times with tools he could have used to escape, including a piece of sharpened metal that could be used as a knife, according to prison records. While he was on death row, he stabbed a guard and hit another worker with a concrete block, the records show. 'The nature of the man is violence,' prosecutors wrote. Mahdi is to be the second inmate executed by South Carolina's new firing squad after Brad Sigmon chose that way to die last month. The firing squad is an execution method with a long and violent history in the U.S. and around the world. Death in a hail of bullets has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America's Old West and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Before Sigmon's execution last month, only three other prisoners in the U.S. had been executed by firing squad in the past 50 years. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010. Three prison employees who volunteer for the role will fire high-powered rifles at Mahdi from 15 feet (about 4.5 meters) away, aiming for a target on his heart. Mahdi also could have chosen the electric chair or lethal injection.
The Independent
07-04-2025
- The Independent
South Carolina's highest court refuses to stop second firing squad execution
South Carolina 's highest court on Monday rejected the last major appeal from Mikal Mahdi, who is scheduled to die by firing squad later this week for the ambush killing of an off-duty police officer. Mahdi's lawyers said his original attorneys put on a shallow case trying to spare his life that didn't call on relatives, teachers or people who knew him and ignored the impact of weeks spent in solitary confinement in prison as a teen. But the state Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, ruled that many of those arguments were made in earlier unsuccessful appeals and refused to stop Friday's scheduled execution so further hearings could be held. Mahdi, who admitted killing an off-duty police officer in an ambush at the officer's Calhoun County shed, is the fifth person set to be executed in South Carolina in less than eight months. All made final appeals to the state Supreme Court but all were rejected. Mahdi has one more opportunity to live, by asking Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to reduce his sentence to life in prison without parole just minutes before his scheduled execution time. He is to be put to death with three bullets to the heart at 6 p.m. on April 11 at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. But no South Carolina governor has offered clemency in the 47 executions carried out in the state since the death penalty resumed in the U.S. in 1976. Mahdi, 41, was convicted of killing Orangeburg Public Safety officer James Myers in 2004, shooting him at least eight times, then burning his body. Myers' wife found him in the shed, which had been the backdrop to their wedding 15 months earlier. Myers' shed was a short distance through the woods from a gas station where Mahdi tried but failed to buy gas with a stolen credit card and left behind a vehicle he had carjacked in Columbia. Mahdi was arrested afterward in Florida while driving Myers' unmarked police pickup truck. Mahdi also admitted to the killing three days earlier of Christopher Biggs, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, convenience store clerk who was shot twice in the head as he checked Mahdi's ID. Mahdi was sentenced to life in prison for that killing. Mahdi pleaded guilty to killing Myers, leaving a judge under South Carolina law to decide if he would be sentenced to death or life without parole. Prosecutors called 28 witnesses for Circuit Court Judge Clifton Newman to hear. The defense called two, according to Mahdi's appeal. The defense's case to spare Mahdi's life lasted only about 30 minutes. It 'didn't even span the length of a Law & Order episode, and was just as superficial,' Mahdi's lawyers wrote. Prosecutors said Mahdi was able to present much more evidence during a 2011 appeal that had to be heard inside a prison because Mahdi had stabbed a death row guard during an escape attempt. A judge rejected the appeal. 'In Mahdi's vernacular, if his mitigation presentation before Judge Newman 'didn't even span the length of a Law & Order episode,' the review of any potential error is in its 24th season,' the state Attorney General's Office wrote in court papers. As a prisoner, Mahdi has been caught three times with tools he could have used to escape, including a piece of sharpened metal that could be used as a knife, according to prison records. While he was on death row, he stabbed a guard and hit another worker with a concrete block, the records show. 'The nature of the man is violence,' prosecutors wrote. Mahdi is to be the second inmate executed by South Carolina's new firing squad after Brad Sigmon chose that way to die last month. The firing squad is an execution method with a long and violent history in the U.S. and around the world. Death in a hail of bullets has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America's Old West and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Before Sigmon's execution last month, only three other prisoners in the U.S. had been executed by firing squad in the past 50 years. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010. Three prison employees who volunteer for the role will fire high-powered rifles at Mahdi from 15 feet (about 4.5 meters) away, aiming for a target on his heart. Mahdi also could have chosen the electric chair or lethal injection.
Associated Press
07-04-2025
- Associated Press
South Carolina's highest court refuses to stop second firing squad execution
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina's highest court on Monday rejected the last major appeal from Mikal Mahdi, who is scheduled to die by firing squad later this week for the ambush killing of an off-duty police officer. Mahdi's lawyers said his original attorneys put on a shallow case trying to spare his life that didn't call on relatives, teachers or people who knew him and ignored the impact of weeks spent in solitary confinement in prison as a teen. But the state Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, ruled that many of those arguments were made in earlier unsuccessful appeals and refused to stop Friday's scheduled execution so further hearings could be held. Mahdi, who admitted killing an off-duty police officer in an ambush at the officer's Calhoun County shed, is the fifth person set to be executed in South Carolina in less than eight months. All made final appeals to the state Supreme Court but all were rejected. Mahdi has one more opportunity to live, by asking Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to reduce his sentence to life in prison without parole just minutes before his scheduled execution time. He is to be put to death with three bullets to the heart at 6 p.m. on April 11 at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. But no South Carolina governor has offered clemency in the 47 executions carried out in the state since the death penalty resumed in the U.S. in 1976. Mahdi, 41, was convicted of killing Orangeburg Public Safety officer James Myers in 2004, shooting him at least eight times, then burning his body. Myers' wife found him in the shed, which had been the backdrop to their wedding 15 months earlier. Myers' shed was a short distance through the woods from a gas station where Mahdi tried but failed to buy gas with a stolen credit card and left behind a vehicle he had carjacked in Columbia. Mahdi was arrested afterward in Florida while driving Myers' unmarked police pickup truck. Mahdi also admitted to the killing three days earlier of Christopher Biggs, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, convenience store clerk who was shot twice in the head as he checked Mahdi's ID. Mahdi was sentenced to life in prison for that killing. Mahdi pleaded guilty to killing Myers, leaving a judge under South Carolina law to decide if he would be sentenced to death or life without parole. Prosecutors called 28 witnesses for Circuit Court Judge Clifton Newman to hear. The defense called two, according to Mahdi's appeal. The defense's case to spare Mahdi's life lasted only about 30 minutes. It 'didn't even span the length of a Law & Order episode, and was just as superficial,' Mahdi's lawyers wrote. Prosecutors said Mahdi was able to present much more evidence during a 2011 appeal that had to be heard inside a prison because Mahdi had stabbed a death row guard during an escape attempt. A judge rejected the appeal. 'In Mahdi's vernacular, if his mitigation presentation before Judge Newman 'didn't even span the length of a Law & Order episode,' the review of any potential error is in its 24th season,' the state Attorney General's Office wrote in court papers. As a prisoner, Mahdi has been caught three times with tools he could have used to escape, including a piece of sharpened metal that could be used as a knife, according to prison records. While he was on death row, he stabbed a guard and hit another worker with a concrete block, the records show. 'The nature of the man is violence,' prosecutors wrote. Mahdi is to be the second inmate executed by South Carolina's new firing squad after Brad Sigmon chose that way to die last month. The firing squad is an execution method with a long and violent history in the U.S. and around the world. Death in a hail of bullets has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America's Old West and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Before Sigmon's execution last month, only three other prisoners in the U.S. had been executed by firing squad in the past 50 years. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010. Three prison employees who volunteer for the role will fire high-powered rifles at Mahdi from 15 feet (about 4.5 meters) away, aiming for a target on his heart.
