The South Carolina Supreme Court refused an appeal made in an attempt to block the firing squad execution later this week for a man who ambushed and killed an off-duty police officer.
Mikal Mahdi’s lawyers sought to stay his execution and reasoned that his original defense team presented a shoddy case on his behalf when he was on trial. His original attorneys didn’t bring forward any relatives, teachers, or any other people relevant to him and neglected to consider the impact extended solitary confinement had on him as a teenager, his new team argued.
But state Supreme Court decided in a unanimous decision to allow Friday’s execution to move forward.
So far, four people have been executed in South Carolina in the last eight months. All of the inmates’ appeals filed to the state Supreme Court were rejected, and no South Carolina governor has offered clemency in the 47 executions carried out in the state since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.
Still, Republican Gov. Henry McMaster is Mahdi’s last hope.
Mahdi was convicted of killing Orangeburg Public Safety officer James Myers in 2004. He ambushed the off-duty cop, shot him at least eight times, and burned his body in a shed that had been the backdrop to the officer’s wedding just 15 months earlier.
He was later arrested in Florida while driving the cop’s unmarked police pickup truck.
Mahdi also admitted to killing Christopher Biggs, a convenience store clerk in North Carolina, just three days prior. Biggs was shot twice in the head while he was checking Mahdi’s ID. He was sentenced to life in prison for that killing.
For Myers’ killing, Mahdi pled guilty and was sentenced to death. The entire defense’s argument fighting for Mahdi’s life only lasted 30 minutes and included just two witnesses, according to his new lawyers, who wrote that it “was just as superficial” as “a Law & Order episode.”
On the opposite end, the prosecution called a staggering 28 witnesses.
Should Mahdi’s execution go forward, he will be the second inmate executed by South Carolina’s new firing squad after Brad Sigmon chose to be shot to death last month. Sigmon was also the first death row inmate in 15 years to choose death by firing squad.
Mahdi is to be put to death with three bullets to the heart at 6 p.m. on April 11 at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia.
With Post wires
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