Mikal Mahdi Executed by Firing Squad in South Carolina

Mikal Mahdi’s execution came about a month after the first person in state history was killed in such a manner. Before that, no person had been killed by a firing squad in the United States in 15 years.

South Carolina executed another convicted murderer by firing squad on Friday night, the second such execution in the state.

The inmate, Mikal Mahdi, 41, was declared dead shortly after 6 p.m. after a firing squad shot three bullets at a target placed over his heart, the State Department of Corrections said.

A judge had ordered Mr. Mahdi, who pleaded guilty in 2006 to fatally shooting an off-duty police officer in South Carolina, to choose from three methods of execution: lethal injection, electrocution or firing squad. His lawyer, David Weiss, said that Mr. Mahdi did not want to offer a public explanation for why he chose a firing squad.

His execution came just a month after Brad Sigmon, who was convicted of beating his ex-girlfriend’s parents to death with a baseball bat in 2001, became the first inmate to be executed by firing squad execution in the state — and the first in the United States in 15 years.

Mr. Sigmon had chosen to be shot on March 7 because he had concerns about South Carolina’s lethal injection process, his lawyer said.

Polls show that a majority of Americans favor the death penalty, although many view firing squads as an archaic form of justice. But as lethal injection drugs have become harder to obtain, and have at times resulted in botched executions, several states have recently legalized firing squads as an execution method.

Utah had previously been the only state to use a firing squad in modern times; it did so in 2010, 1996 and 1977.

Mr. Mahdi’s lawyers had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case and issue a stay of execution, but the court did not grant one. Mr. Mahdi had also asked Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, for clemency, but that was denied. No South Carolina governor has granted clemency since the death penalty resumed in the United States in 1976.

Arrest records show that on July 14, 2004, when Mr. Mahdi was 21, he stole a gun and a car in Virginia and fatally shot Christopher Biggs, a store clerk in Winston-Salem, N.C., in the face as he checked Mr. Mahdi’s identification. Three days later, Mr. Mahdi stole someone’s car in Columbia, S.C., according to records.

Then, on July 18, Mr. Mahdi hid in a shed at the home of James Myers, a public safety officer in Orangeburg, S.C. The shed was near a gas station where Mr. Mahdi had unsuccessfully tried to buy gas with a stolen credit card and left the stolen vehicle behind, records show.

When Mr. Myers, 56, returned to the house, Mr. Mahdi ambushed him and shot him at least eight times, according to court records. Mr. Mahdi then set Mr. Myers’s body on fire and fled. The victim’s wife found his body in the shed, according to records.

Mr. Weiss, the lawyer, said in an interview on Thursday that Mr. Mahdi “takes complete responsibility for the crimes that he committed.”

“He knows how awful they were, he knows how much pain he’s caused, and he really just does his best to sort of live a life of the mind,” Mr. Weiss said. He added that South Carolina’s execution process, in which a death row inmate chooses how to be killed, “shows that we’re on this sort of fruitless search to find the right way to kill people. And I think at the end of the day, there really isn’t a right way to kill people.”

Mr. Weiss said that Mr. Mahdi grew up in an abusive household. His father abused his mother, who fled the home when Mr. Mahdi was 4. As a result, Mr. Mahdi suffered from depression and mental health issues, Mr. Weiss said, and when his school tried to get him help, his father pulled him out.

Mr. Mahdi’s life devolved from there, Mr. Weiss said: He began stealing to help support himself and his brother because their father, who had his own mental illness, was not working. He went to juvenile prison at 14. He spent the next seven years in and out of prison before committing the two murders.