(The Center Square) – For the second time in 36 days, a firing squad execution has been carried out in South Carolina.
Mikal Mahdi, 42, died Friday night in Columbia less than four minutes after shots were fired. Mahdi is the 12th inmate executed in the United States this calendar year, and fifth in eight months by South Carolina following an unintended 13-year pause.
Brad Sigmon was put to death on March 7, also in Columbia and by firing squad.
David Weiss, assistant federal public defender at the Capital Habeas Unit for the Fourth Circuit, which is part of the Federal Public Defender’s Office in the Western District of North Carolina, said in a statement Mahdi was a “smart, creative, intellectually curious person” that never got the chance to do more with his life.
“Tonight,” Weiss said, “the state of South Carolina executed him by firing squad – a horrifying act that belongs in the darkest chapters of history, not in a civilized society.”
South Carolina allows inmates to choose firing squad, lethal injection or electric chair. In a firing squad execution, the inmate is strapped to a chair in the death chamber. A hood is placed over the head, a target put on the heart. The shooters, three volunteers, all have live ammunition and fire from an opening about 15 feet away.
The state has encountered issues with lethal injection. The electric chair has been described as being “cooked alive.”
Mahdi admitted killing an Orangeburg Public Safety officer, shooting him eight times and burning his body.
Sigmon, 67, had been on death row for the 2001 beating death with a baseball bat of his former girlfriend’s parents in Greenville County.
Prior to the two in South Carolina, all three firing squad executions since 1976 happened in Utah. That state’s most recent had been 2010.
