A murderer who shot a police officer dead before burning his corpse has been executed by firing squad.
Mikal Mahdi chose to die via the ultra rare execution method, in only the second firing squad death in the country in the last 15 years.
Nine witnesses observed Mikal Mahdi’s final moments at Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, as he groaned and breathed heavily for minutes after the shots hit him.
The prisoner feasted on ribeye steak, mushroom risotta and cheesecake in his final meal before heading to the execution chamber.
He was strapped to a metal chair, a hood draped over his head and a white target a red bull’s-eye was placed on his heart.
The killer inhaled and exhaled deeply for 45 seconds before the fatal shots rang out.
They were fired by three trained volunteers at a distance of about 15 feet (4.6 meters).
As the bullets hit, Mahdi cried out and flexed his arms in pain. The white target was pushed into the open hole in his chest.
For the next two minutes he groaned and breathed until taking one final gasp.
A doctor then pronounced him dead four minutes after the firing squad had unleashed their bullets.
Mahdi had chose to die like this while on death row, rejecting the options of lethal injection or electroction.
His lawyer David Weiss called the execution ‘a horrifying act that belongs in the darkest chapters of history, not in a civilised society.’
He added: ‘Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi has chosen the lesser of three evils.
‘Mikal chose the firing squad instead of being burned and mutilated in the electric chair, or suffering a lingering death on the lethal injection gurney.
‘Mikal died in full view of a system that failed him at every turn — from childhood to his final breath.’
But judges dismissed attempts to stop the firing squad death, which prosecutors said was justified because he was a man inclined towards violence.
As a death row prisoner, he stabbed a guard and hit another worker with a concrete block.
The crime that sent him to death dated back to 2004, when he shot dead an off duty police officer James Myers.
Myers had found Mahdi hiding in a garden shed at his home before Mahdi killed him and set the body on fire.
The murderer also pleaded guilty to killing a store worker, who was checking his ID, three days earlier.
Mahdi’s attorney said the decision to go ahead with his clients execution was rushed, with a court session that ‘didn’t even span the length of a Law & Order episode’.
The firing squad death came just a month after Brad Sigmon was killed by the same method in March.
Sigmon’s was the first U.S. firing squad death in 15 years and just the fourth since 1976.
In 2021, South Carolina brought back firing squad as an option for ending the lives of death row inmates.
The state is now rapidly trying to get through prisoners who ran out of appeals during an unintended 13-year pause on executions.
Mahdi became the fifth inmate executed in the state in less than eight months, and the twelth execution in the U.S. this year.
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The 12 executions this year is higher than the total number for the whole 2020 and 2021 alone.
There were 25 last year, however.
The death penalty in the UK
The death penalty, most often via hanging, was around the centuries in the United Kingdom.
An estimated 72,000 people were executed during the reign of Henry VIII alone.
By the late 18th century there were over 220 crimes in Britain that could attract a death sentence, including cutting down a tree or stealing from a rabbit warren.
Moral doubt about the death penalty began to grow and grow during the 19th century and by 1861, the number of capital crimes had been reduced to five, including murder, treason and espionage.
The tide turned against capital punishment in the 1950s after the separate executions of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley.
Evans was wrongfully executed for the murder of his wife and daughter, while Bentley was executed for a murder he did not directly commit.
After years of pressure, the death penalty for murder in Britain was suspended for five years 1965 and this was made permanent in 1969.
It was not until 1998 that the death penalty was finally abolished for all crimes in Britain.
The last people executed in the UK were Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans on 13 August 1964.
Reinstated in 1976 by the Supreme Court, the death penalty has been a controversial issue in the U.S.
23 out of the country’s 50 states have banned the practice, while another three have temporarily suspended it.
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