A second South Carolina death row inmate chooses execution by firing squad
The South Carolina Department of Corrections chamber, including the electric chair, right, and a firing squad chair. A South Carolina death row inmate on Friday chose execution by firing squad, just five weeks after the state carried out its first death by bullets. “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.” Mahdi ambushed Orangeburg public safety officer James Myers at the officer’s shed in Calhoun County in July 2004. “In Mahdi’s vernacular, if his mitigation presentation before Judge Newman ‘didn’t even span the length of a Law & Order episode,’ the review of any potential error is in its 24th season,” the state Attorney General’s Office wrote in court papers. Prosecutors said a lot of the new evidence would not help Mahdi’s case, including a string of attacks and threats on prison employees; his guilty plea to killing a convenience store clerk in Winston-Salem, N.C., before the South Carolina killing; and two other deaths that authorities in Virginia think he may be connected to.
Is South Carolina Willing to Heed the Clearest Lesson We Have About Executions?
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