A prison firing squad in South Carolina executed Mikal Mahdi on Friday, the second recent death row killing in the state by authorized gunfire.
Mahdi, 42, was shot dead by corrections employees inside the execution chamber, where authorities have carried out a rapid spree of killings as South Carolina aggressively revives capital punishment.
Mahdi was sentenced to death for the 2004 killing of James Myers, a 56-year-old off-duty public safety officer. His attorneys fought in recent days to block the execution, arguing he had suffered significant abuse and torture in his childhood and was denied a fair trial, but the state courts and US supreme court rejected the final petitions.
South Carolina’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, announced minutes before Mahdi’s execution that he would not be commuting Mahdi’s sentence. No governor in the state has granted clemency to a death row defendant in the last 50 years of the modern death penalty era.
The state resumed executions last year after a 13-year pause caused by its inability to procure lethal injection supplies. Officials now direct people on death row to choose their method of killing – either electric chair, lethal injection and firing squad. Mahdi’s lawyers said he selected the “lesser of three evils” and opted to be shot instead of “burned and mutilated in the electric chair, or suffering a lingering death on the lethal injection gurney”.
Unlike the state’s first execution last year of a man who presented evidence of his innocence in his final days, Mahdi’s lawyers have not disputed his conviction or the facts of his case.
His attorneys argued his constitutional rights were violated and that he should not have been sentenced to death, documenting an upbringing of violence and neglect in a US supreme court petition.
Some of Mahdi’s earliest memories were of his father abusing his mother, who fled when he was four, and by age nine he was suicidal and briefly committed to a psychiatric facility. He did not get further treatment, and was homeschooled by his father who embraced conspiracy theories, the petition said. Mahdi entered the prison system as a young teen.
Between ages 14 and 21, Mahdi spent an estimated total of 8,000 hours in solitary confinement while incarcerated, enduring prolonged isolation in conditions now widely regarded as torture, his attorneys said.
At age 21, two months after a release from prison, he committed a series of violent crimes, including robbing a convenience store, fatally shooting the clerk, fleeing police and breaking into a shed at Myers’s home and killing him.
Mahdi pleaded guilty, but his trial lawyers failed to properly advocate for him at sentencing, his attorneys argued. While prosecutors called 28 witnesses, Mahdi’s attorneys at the time called two individuals, only one of whom offered minimal testimony on his history of trauma.
The judge did not learn about instances of extreme violence committed by his father, Mahdi’s severe mental health crises at a young age, or that he had spent the vast majority of his teenage years imprisoned without getting necessary treatment, often languishing in solitary, his lawyers said.
After Mahdi’s trial counsels presented “barely half an hour” of “mitigating evidence”, the judge sentenced him to death, saying Mahdi lacked “humanity” and that it didn’t seem as if his “turbulent and transient childhood … contributed in any significant way” to the crimes.
“Mikal’s sentencing hearing was a sham,” his lawyer, David Weiss, said in a statement before the execution. “He was sentenced to die even though his trial lawyers never explained the trauma that shaped his life and led him to commit terrible acts at only 21 years old. Now 42, Mikal is deeply remorseful and a dramatically different person from the confused, angry, and abused youth who committed the capital crimes.”
On death row, Mahdi had spent time reading history and nonfiction and trying to learn Spanish by watching Telemundo, Weiss told the Guardian in an earlier interview. In his final days, he had also asked to have his organs donated after his death, but his attorneys were told healthcare protocols would bar the donations.
Anti-death penalty advocates held vigils this week calling for McMaster to grant clemency, and two of Mahdi’s elementary school teachers also publicly urged for his life to be spared.
Mahdi is the 12th person executed this year so far. His killing comes one month after South Carolina shot dead 67-year-old Brad Sigmon, who was the first person executed by firing squad in the US in 15 years. There have only been three other firing squad executions under the contemporary death penalty, all in Utah, but Idaho recently passed a law to make shooting the primary execution method in the state. Last month, Louisiana carried out a rare execution using nitrogen gas, an experimental method banned under state law for euthanizing dogs and cats.
South Carolina has executed five people in the last seven months and continues to face scrutiny over the secrecy of its methods and the brutal conditions men face on death row.