April 11 (UPI) — South Carolina jail officers will put a person to dying by firing squad for the second time in simply over a month after they execute Mikal Mahdi on Friday on the Broad River Correctional Institute in Columbia, S.C.
Mahdi, 42, was convicted of the 2004 homicide of off-duty Orangeburg Public Security Capt. James Myers.
Mahdi’s execution is scheduled to happen at 3 p.m. EDT, when he can be strapped to a metallic chair whereas carrying a hood and three corrections employees will shoot him within the coronary heart concurrently utilizing rifles.
In early March, the South Carolina Division of Corrections executed Brad Sigmon by firing squad, marking the first-ever execution by that methodology within the state and the fifth total since the USA Supreme Court docket reaffirmed the observe in 1976.
Sigmon’s dying was the primary firing squad execution in the USA in 15 years. The opposite three have all occurred in Utah.
In early March, the South Carolina Division of Corrections executed Brad Sigmon by firing squad, marking the first-ever execution by that methodology within the state and the fifth total since the USA Supreme Court docket reaffirmed the observe in 1976. File Picture courtesy of the South Carolina Division of Corrections
Idaho in 2023 grew to become the latest state to allow firing squads, becoming a member of Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah. Florida has signaled it may additionally quickly permit the observe.
Ought to Mahdi’s execution be carried out Friday, he would change into the third inmate to be put to dying in South Carolina this yr and the twelfth in the USA.
Mahdi was 21 when he shot and killed Myers, in July 2004. Court docket data state he waited on the regulation enforcement officer’s property in Calhoun County, S.C., with a rifle for him to return. He then burned his physique and stole a number of firearms.
On the time, police have been searching for Mahdi for one more taking pictures dying within the space in addition to an armed theft and carjacking.
Mahdi selected the firing squad possibility over deadly injection or the electrical chair, South Carolina’s two different execution strategies.
Mahdi’s authorized staff earlier within the week filed a clemency request Gov. Henry McMaster, R-S.C.
“If the execution goes by means of, they will hearth three high-powered rifles at our consumer’s chest,” Mahdi’s lawyer David Weiss told Fox News Digital in an interview.
“It is a horrible factor for him to undergo. It is a horrible factor to should witness for everyone concerned, from the authorized staff to witnesses to jail employees who’ve to hold it out.”
Weiss stated he and Mahdi considered the electrical chair as being “cook dinner[ed] from the within out,” whereas calling the deadly injection methodology “fairly torturous.”
In the course of the execution, the inmate is strapped to the chair within the facility’s dying chamber, housing the electrical chair which can’t be eliminated, based on jail officers. A goal is then strapped over their coronary heart. The three corrections employees that volunteer for the obligation then hearth rifles concurrently from behind a wall and the inmate is asserted useless.
As with different execution strategies, witnesses sit in an adjoining room and watch by means of protecting glass till the process is over.
“It is a troublesome sight to reconcile in real-time. You are watching it occurring. You are pondering, I simply noticed a gap open up in that individual,” lawyer Bo King, who represented Sigmon and was current at his execution in March, informed Fox Information Digital.
“The quantity of harm that I noticed finished to Brad’s physique is past something that I might contemplate.”
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