South Carolina: Mikal Mahdi executed – second execution by firing squad in a few weeks
On Friday evening, 42-year-old Mikal Mahdi was executed by firing squad in the US state of South Carolina. He was sentenced to death for the murder of an off-duty security guard in 2004. The crime was part of a series of crimes that spanned several US states and claimed yet another life.
While his appellate attorneys do not dispute Mahdi’s guilt, they tried in vain to point out that their client should have received mitigating circumstances and been exempt from the death penalty due to his socialization marked by violence and neglect.
As a small child, Mikal Mahdi witnessed his father severely abusing his mother. She eventually fled and left her children behind. At the age of less than ten, Mahdi was already suffering from severe depression and suicidal thoughts. Instead of treatment, he ended up in the prison system as a teenager and spent long periods in solitary confinement.
Highly traumatized by his father’s treatment and by the state system, he committed the series of crimes two months after his release from prison at the age of 21. Governor Henry McMaster declared a few minutes before the execution that he would not commute the sentence. In the 50 or so years of the “modern” death penalty in the USA, none of South Carolina’s governors has ever granted clemency to a person sentenced to death.
After death row inmates in this US state have to choose the method of execution from lethal injection, electric chair or firing squad, Mahdi opted for the firing squad – just like his fellow inmate Brad Sigmon five weeks earlier.
Mahdi, strapped to a chair, cried out as the shots rang out, tensed his arms and moaned twice more about 45 seconds after the bullets were fired, according to a reporter who acted as a media witness. His breaths lasted about 80 seconds before he appeared to take a final breath. He was pronounced dead four minutes after the shots were fired, witnesses said.
Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/11/mikal-mahdi-execution-south-carolina
https://www.aclu.org/news/capital-punishment/death-row-case-exposes-failures-to-protect-childhood-trauma-survivors