A convicted killer executed by firing squad in South Carolina last month experienced “excruciating conscious pain and suffering” for up to a minute after the shooters “largely missed his heart,” resulting in a prolonged death, according to his attorneys.
According to the Associated Press, Mikal Mahdi, 42, cried out and groaned twice before taking his last breath after being shot.
Mahdi’s firing squad execution on April 11 is the second this year in South Carolina using the controversial method.
Mahdi’s attorneys filed a status report with the South Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday, claiming that their client’s death was a “massive botch.”
“The implications of this botch are horrifying,” the attorneys wrote in the “Notice of Botched Execution” report, obtained by The Guardian.
Citing a third-party autopsy report commissioned by the SCDC, the lawyers claim the corrections department shooters made several alleged mistakes, including firing two shots instead of three as required and indicating that their poor shot placement all contributed to Madhi’s “suffering.”
Madhi appeared to have two half-inch wounds that were “just above the border with the abdomen, which is not an area largely overlying the heart,” Dr. Jonathan Arden, one of the autopsy pathologists, noted in the report, 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.”
Mahdi’s attorneys stated that they felt obligated to share the information with the court and other inmates who would face the same dilemma.
They said Mahdi had the option of dying by firing squad, lethal injection, or the electric chair, and that he chose the firing squad as the “lesser of three evils,” according to his attorneys.
“Mr. Mahdi elected the firing squad, and this Court sanctioned it, based on the assumption that SCDC could be entrusted to carry out its straightforward steps: locating the heart; placing a target over it; and hitting that target,” according to the report’s attorneys. “That confidence was clearly misplaced.”
Mahdi was on death row for the 2004 murder of Orangeburg Public Safety officer James Myers, who was shot at least eight times and burned. Myers’ wife found him in the shed that had served as the backdrop for their wedding 15 months earlier.
He had also admitted to the murder of Christopher Biggs, a convenience store clerk from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who was shot twice in the head while checking Mahdi’s ID three days earlier. Mahdi was sentenced to life in prison for the killing.
Mahdi’s execution came just over a month after Brad Sigmon was executed on March 7, the first firing squad death in the United States in 15 years and the fourth since 1976. All of the other incidents took place in Utah.
The firing squad is an execution method with a long and violent history around the world, but South Carolina lawmakers saw it as the quickest and most humane option, especially given the uncertainty surrounding the availability of lethal injection drugs, according to the Associated Press.
