Firing Squad Set To Execute South Carolina Death Row Inmate

A firing squad in South Carolina is set to execute an inmate who ambushed an off-duty police officer, shot him nine times and set him on fire. Under the state's execution protocols, the firing squad will put a hood over 42-year-old Mikal Mahdi's head and shoot him in the heart simultaneously with three bullets on Friday, USA Today reports. It will be the second such execution in the state this year but only the fifth in the U.S. since 1977. South Carolina carried out the firing squad execution of Brad Keith Sigmon last month in what was the first execution to use the method in the U.S. in 15 years. Mahdi was convicted of the 2004 killing of James Myers, 56, an off-duty Orangeburg public safety officer who was killed at the same spot on his farm property where he and his wife got married. She was the one to find his body.

"His heart and mind are full of hate and malice," prosecutor David Pascoe told jurors." (He's) the epitome of evil." Mahdi's attorneys argue that he should be spared because he never got the mental health care he "desperately needed" as a child who repeatedly threatened suicide and endured "extraordinary abuse and trauma." If Mahdi's execution moves forward, he will become the 12th inmate executed in the U.S. this year and the third in South Carolina. Mahdi is set to be executed just after 6 p.m. ET at the Broad River Correctional Institute in Columbia. He will sit restrained in a metal chair, a hood over his head, in the corner of a room shared by the state's electric chair, which can't be moved. The firing squad − three volunteer corrections staffers− will stand behind a wall with rifles 15 feet from Mahdi. The wall has an opening for the weapons.