A convicted killer who was executed in South Carolina by firing squad last month endured “excruciating conscious pain and suffering” for up to a minute when the shooters “largely missed his heart,” causing him to suffer a prolonged death, according to his attorneys.
Mikal Mahdi, 42, cried out as the bullets hit him and groaned twice before he took his final gasp of breath, the Associated Press reported.
The firing squad execution of Mahdi on April 11 is the second one to be carried out this year in South Carolina using the controversial method.
Now Mahdi’s attorneys have submitted a status report with the South Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday, claiming 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 several alleged mistakes were made by the corrections department shooters, writing that they fired two shots instead of three, as required, and indicated that their low placement of shots, all ultimately led 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 pathologists from the autopsy, 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 document says, quoting 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 wrote that they felt obliged to share the information with the court and other inmates who will face this same dilemma.
They said Mahdi had the choice of dying by firing squad, lethal injection, or the electric chair – and that he had chosen the firing squad, what he considered the “lesser of three evils”, his attorneys said.
“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,” the attorneys wrote in the report. “That confidence was clearly misplaced.”
Mahdi had been on death row for the killing of Orangeburg Public Safety officer James Myers in 2004, shooting him at least eight times, then burning his body. Myers’ wife found him in the shed, which had been the backdrop to their wedding 15 months earlier.
He had also admitted to the killing three days earlier of Christopher Biggs, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, convenience store clerk who was shot twice in the head as he checked Mahdi’s ID. Mahdi was sentenced to life in prison for that killing.
Mahdi’s execution came a little over a month after Brad Sigmon was put to death March 7, in the first U.S. firing squad death in 15 years and the fourth since 1976. The others all occurred 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 method, especially with the uncertainty in obtaining lethal injection drugs, the Associated Press reported.
