A South Carolina man executed by firing squad last month felt “excruciating conscious pain and suffering” for up to a minute before dying as a result of a “massive botch” by the shooters, who “largely missed his heart,” according to the inmate’s attorneys.
“The implications of this botch are horrifying,” says Mikal Madhi’s legal team in a status report and “Notice of Botched Execution” filed with the South Carolina Supreme Court. According to the filing, the respondent is Bryan Stirling, the state’s former Director of Corrections (SCDC), who resigned at the end of April.
According to Mahdi’s attorneys, the document cites a third-party autopsy report commissioned by the SCDC that shows several alleged mistakes made by the department shooters during Mahdi’s execution on April 11, including poor shot placement. According to Madhi’s lawyers, the shooters fired two shots instead of the required three, and their actions resulted in the “suffering” he endured.
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Dr. Jonathan Arden, one of the autopsy pathologists, reported that Madhi appeared to have two half-inch wounds “just above the border with the abdomen, which is not an area largely overlying the heart,” according to the Supreme Court notice.
“The autopsy also documents two distinct wound paths that traveled ‘downward and to the right’ inside Mr. Mahdi’s torso, ‘macerat[ing] the left lobe of the liver and the pancreas’ and ‘the left lower lung lobe’ before crashing into his spine and ribs,” the paper states, citing Arden’s report.
“Along the way, bullet fragments made ‘two perforations of the right ventricle of [Mr. Mahdi’s] heart, comprising two holes in the front, and two holes in the back,’ leaving it otherwise intact,” according to the notice.
Mahdi was on death row for a 2004 multistate crime spree that included three alleged murders, two of which he was tried and convicted of.
“As his advocates, and as officers of the Court, we feel obliged to share this information with you, and with other condemned prisoners who will face this same dilemma,” claimed Mahdi’s attorneys. “Mr. Mahdi chose the firing squad, and this Court approved it, on the assumption that SCDC could be trusted to carry out the simple steps of locating the heart, placing a target over it, and hitting that target. That confidence was obviously misplaced.”
