South Carolina completes its second execution by firing squad

As reported in this local piece, “At 6:01 p.m., in a crack of rifle shots, Mikal Mahdi was executed inside of the Broad River Road Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, on Friday.”  Here is more:  

Mahdi, who killed two people during a 2004 crime spree across four states, was sentenced to death after pleading guilty in 2006.

He chose to die by firing squad, making him just the second person in South Carolina to select that method of execution. He was just the fifth person in the United States executed by firing squad since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court re-instituted the death penalty…

On Friday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up Mahdi’s appeal. Mahdi was sentenced to death in 2006 for the murder of off-duty Orangeburg Department of Public Safety captain James Myers. Mahdi ambushed Myers, 56, as the officer returned from celebrating his daughter’s birthday at the beach. Mahdi, 21 at the time, was hiding in a shed on Myers’ property in Calhoun County….

Just days before murdering Myers, Mahdi shot and killed a North Carolina gas station clerk, Christopher Boggs, over a can of beer and carjacked a vehicle in Columbia, South Carolina. The crime spree began only months after Mahdi was released from prison.

First Circuit Solicitor David Pascoe, who tried Mahdi, described him as “evil,” with “no regard for human life,” while Mahdi’s defense attorneys argued he was psychologically damaged by an abusive childhood compounded by long periods of isolation….

Violence followed Mahdi in prison. In 2009, Mahdi and another inmate stabbed a death row guard with improvised metal knives. The guard survived the stabbing, which took place inside of the Lieber Correctional Institution in Ridgeville. In an opinion upholding Mahdi’s sentence in a previous appeal, state Supreme Court Justice Jean Toal wrote, “in my time on this Court, I have seen few cases where the extraordinary penalty of death was so deserved.”