According to his attorneys, state marksmen botched the execution of a South Carolina police killer who decided to die by firing squad last month, forcing him to endure a torturous, drawn-out death.
Mikal Mahdi, 42, was put to death on April 11 for killing an off-duty police officer in 2004.
Mahdi chose the firing squad mode of execution over lethal injection or electrocution, according to his lawyers, because he thought it would be the least painful and fastest of the three possibilities.
However, an independent postmortem has indicated Mahdi’s execution did not go according to plan and that the convicted killer endured pain well beyond the ‘10-to-15-second’ window that was expected.
In documents filed in the Supreme Court on Thursday, Mahdi’s attorneys claim that the state’s three marksmen shot their client lower than expected, missing his heart and striking him just above the abdomen, piercing his liver and pancreas.
According to the AP, Mahdi screamed and flexed his arms as the rounds were fired. It took four minutes before he was declared dead, but for at least a minute after that, he was still breathing and moaning.
‘The autopsy confirms what I saw and heard,’ David Weiss, an attorney for Mikal Mahdi, told DailyMail.com in a written statement.
‘Mikal suffered an excruciating death. We don’t know what went wrong, but nothing about his execution was humane.
‘The implications are horrifying for anyone facing the same choice as Mikal. South Carolina’s refusal to acknowledge their failures with executions cannot continue.’
Mahdi’s death marked the second time a death row inmate has been executed by firing squad this year in South Carolina.
The postmortem ordered by his lawyers discovered that Mahdi suffered only two distinct gunshot wounds to his torso, even though there were three gunmen, each possessing a live round.
His attorneys believe the execution was bungled because either the volunteer prison workers missed, or the target over Mahdi’s chest to mark the location of his heart wasn’t correctly positioned.
South Carolina’s Corrections Department had earlier conducted its own postmortem on Mahdi and suggested all three bullets had struck him, with two of them entering his body at the same location and following the same path.
That has occurred before during target practice, Corrections Department spokeswoman Chrysti Shane said to AP on Thursday.
Mahdi’s legal team claimed the autopsy provided by the state was ‘incredibly sparse, with far fewer details and photographs than normally issued.’
They also claim that there isn’t enough evidence to support the Corrections Department’s claim that two bullets entered the same spot.
‘The shooters missed the intended target area and the evidence indicates that he was struck by only two bullets, not the prescribed three,’ said Dr. Jonathan Arden, the pathologist hired by Mahdi’s team.
Arden said it likely took Mahdi 30-60 seconds to lose consciousness, two to four times longer than predicted by experts hired by the state.
During that time, Mahdi probably endured intense pain as his lungs attempted to expand against shattered ribs and a broken sternum, while also experiencing “air hunger” – a desperate, suffocating feeling – as his damaged lungs failed to pull in enough oxygen, according to Dr. Arden.
‘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,’ Mahdi’s attorneys wrote in a letter to the South Carolina Supreme Court.
‘That confidence was clearly misplaced.’
In a report summarising his findings, Arden said the state’s official autopsy did not include X-rays, which would have allowed for the results to be independently verified.
Arden also said that only one photo was taken of Mahdi’s body, and no close-ups of the wounds; and his clothing was not examined to determine where the target was placed and how it aligned with the damage the bullets caused to his shirt.
‘I noticed where the target was placed on Mikal’s torso, and I remember thinking to myself, “I’m certainly not an expert in human anatomy, but it appears to me that target looks low,”’ said Mahdi’s attorney, David Weiss.
Dr. Arden said that in his 40-year career, he has never heard of two bullets entering the same spot on a human body before.
The postmortem found damage in only one of the four chambers of Mahdi’s heart – the right ventricle.
However, his pancreas and liver were severely damaged, indicating that the marksmen’s aim was too low.
In contrast, in the execution of Brad Sigmon, who was killed by firing squad in South Carolina in March – the first to be carried out in the US for 15 years – his autopsy showed three distinct bullet wounds and his heart was ‘obliterated’, Arden said.
Sigmon’s postmortem also included X-rays, multiple photographs, and an examination of his clothing.
Without X-rays or other internal scans, the state’s two-bullet-through-one-hole claim cannot be substantiated, Arden added.
Attorney Weiss said the alleged errors in Mahdi’s execution pose a major problem.
‘I think that raises incredibly difficult questions about the type of training and oversight that is going into this process,’ Weiss told AP.
‘It was obvious to me, as a lay person, upon reading his autopsy report, that something went wrong here.
‘We should want to figure out what it was that went wrong when you’ve got state government carrying out the most serious, most grave possible type of function.’
Mahdi’s body has since been cremated, preventing any additional tests.
The 42-year-old confessed to killing Public Safety officer James Myers in 2004, shooting him at least eight times before burning his body.
Myers’ charred remains were found by his wife in a shed in their backyard, which had been the backdrop to their wedding just over a year before.
In addition, Mahdi admitted to killing a convenience store employee three days before killing Myers.
He was arrested in Florida while driving Myers’ unmarked police pickup truck.
His lawyers had petitioned Governor Henry McMaster for a pardon, but the Republican leader of South Carolina had never given clemency before.
‘Mr. Mahdi’s life is a tragic story of a child abandoned at every step’, his lawyers said in a statement.
When Mahdi was four years old, his mother fled her abusive husband, and the boy was raised by his volatile, mentally ill father, they said.
‘Between the ages of 14 and 21, Mikal spent over 80 percent of his life in prison and lived through 8,000 hours in solitary confinement,’ his lawyers said.
‘Now 42, Mikal is deeply remorseful and a dramatically different person from the confused, angry, and abused youth who committed the capital crimes.’
Just hours before his execution, Mahdi’s last appeal was denied.
On the evening of April 11, his sentence was executed in the Columbia prison’s execution chamber in front of less than a dozen witnesses who were seated behind bulletproof glass.
Mahdi had a hood over his head, a white square with a red bull’s-eye over his heart, and he was shackled to a chair.
He made no final statement before his death and evaded eye contact with the gathered onlookers.
At his trial in 2004, prosecutor David Pascoe called Mahdi the ‘epitome of evil.’
‘His heart and mind are full of hate and malice,’ Pascoe said.
I don’t feel for this man, he was evil, but execution, death by lethal injection or other means, is supposed to be done humanely, although I don’t think that killing another human being is humane – what right have we got to take another life? It makes us just as barbaric as the person who perpetrated the crime – we have no right to take another life just because they took a life, you know what they say, ‘an eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind.’
There is ongoing debate and legal interpretation on whether lethal injection or other methods of killing qualify as cruel and unusual punishment.
Although first portrayed as a more compassionate method of execution, it has come under fire and been called harsh and out of the ordinary.
Naturally, the main issues are that there is no guarantee of unconsciousness in every situation and that untrained personnel may perform procedures incorrectly. There have also been cases where people have received paralytic injections and remained conscious during cardiac arrest, which has been compared to torture. However, proponents of lethal injection have maintained that there are no less cruel or reasonable alternatives.
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