Man who killed South Carolina off duty officer executed by firing squad | Law Enforcement Today

COLUMBIA, SC - On Friday, April 11th, a firing squad executed a South Carolina man who killed an off-duty police officer. According to NBC News, the inmate, Mikal Mahdi, gave no final statement and did not look to his right toward the nine witnesses in the room sitting behind bulletproof glass and bars. 

As he was shot, he cried out and his arms flexed. A white target with a red bull's eye over his heart was pushed into the wound in his chest. About 45 seconds later, he groaned two more times. His breaths continued for about 80 seconds before he appeared to take one final gasp. A doctor checked on him for a little over a minute and at 6:05 p.m., Mahdi was declared dead, less than four minutes after the shots were fired.

Mahdi, who was 42-years-old at the time of his execution, chose to die by the firing squad instead of lethal injection or the electric chair. Mahdi was the second inmate in the country to die by the firing squad in the past five weeks. On March 7th, Brad Sigmon was executed in the first U.S. firing squad death in 15 years and only the fourth since 1976. All others occurred in Utah.

The firing squad is an execution method with a long and violent history around the world. It 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.

However, in South Carolina, lawmakers saw it as the quickest and most humane way to execute an inmate, especially with the uncertainty in obtaining lethal injection drugs. Three volunteers fired the bullets that killed Mahdi. 

Mahdi is the fifth inmate executed by South Carolina in less than eight months as the state makes its way through inmates who ran out of appeals during an unintended 13-year pause on executions in the state. Mahdi was the 12th execution in the United States this year. A total of 25 inmates in nine states were executed in all of 2024.

Alabama and Louisiana have executed inmates by nitrogen gas. Florida, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Texas have executed men by lethal injection, while South Carolina has used both the firing squad and lethal injection.

Mahdi admitted to killing Orangeburg Public Safety Officer James Myers in 2004, shooting him at least eight times before burning his body. Myers' wife found him in the couple's Calhoun County 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 in Florida while driving Myers' unmarked police pickup truck. Mahdi also admitted to the killing three days earlier of Christopher Boggs, 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's final appeal was rejected this week by both the U.S. and South Carolina's Supreme Courts. Prosecutors said that Mahdi constantly used brutality to solve his problems. As a death row inmate, he stabbed a correction officer and hit another worker with a concrete block. He as also caught three times with tools he could have used to escape, including a piece of sharpened metal that could be used as a knife. 

Prosecutors wrote, "The nature of this man is violence." Mahdi's attorney said that his client died in full view of a system "that failed him at every turn — from childhood to his final breath." He described the execution as a "horrifying act that belongs in the darkest chapters of history, not in a civilized society."

South Carolina now has 28 inmates on its death row. Just one man has been sentenced to death in the past decade.