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South Carolina executed a man by firing squad on Friday after appeals were denied by the state and U.S. Supreme Courts earlier this week.
Mikal Mahdi, 42, was convicted in the 2004 killings of an off-duty police officer in Calhoun County, South Carolina, and a convenience store clerk in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was sentenced to death for the murder of the officer and life in prison for the clerk’s murder.
Mahdi had the choice of dying by lethal injection, the electric chair or firing squad – and he chose the latter. The Associated Press reported that he did not give a final statement nor look at the nine people witnessing his execution before a hood was put over his head and shots were fired by three prison employees who volunteered for the act. He was declared dead less than four minutes later.
Prison officials announced that he requested ribeye steak cooked medium, mushroom risotto, broccoli, collard greens, cheesecake and sweet tea for his last meal.
Orangeburg Department of Public Safety Capt. James Myers, 56, was violently murdered by Mikal Mahdi on July 18, 2004, at a shed on his property. (SC Law Enforcement Officers Hall of Fame)
Mahdi’s lawyers entered a final appeal to the South Carolina and the U.S. Supreme Courts, but it was rejected earlier this week.
They argued that Mahdi was not fairly represented by his original lawyers as they did not call on relatives, teachers or other people who knew him during the case, adding that they also ignored how the several months Mahdi spent in solitary confinement as a teen impacted him.
Prosecutors, on the other hand, said Mahdi’s nature was “violence” and said he solved problems with brutality, mentioning how he stabbed a prison guard and hit another worker with a concrete block during his years on death row.
He was also caught with tools that could have been used to escape, including sharpened metal that could have acted as a knife, prison records stated.
Mikal Mahdi was the second death row inmate in South Carolina to be executed by firing squad in the past five weeks. (South Carolina Department of Corrections via AP)
The execution on Friday marked the second time a South Carolina inmate has been put to death by firing squad in the past five weeks and the fifth execution overall in the state over the past eight months.
Following Mahdi’s death, the Palmetto State now has 26 inmates on death row – only one of those people has been sentenced to death in the past decade.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.