A cop-killer who shot his victim nine times before setting him on fire will be executed tonight.
Mikal Mahdi, 42, is to be executed at 6pm (10pm UK time) at a prison in Columbia, South Carolina, for the murder of 56-year-old police captain James Myers.
Myers was shot nine times after he found Mahdi hiding in a shed on his property. Mahdi then set his body set on fire.
Mahdi also pleaded guilty to murdering a convenience store clerk three days before he killed Myers.
South Carolina gives Death Row inmates a choice between lethal injection, the electric chair or the firing squad.
Mahdi chose the firing squad, which is an uncommon choice and will be just the fifth time a prisoner has been executed by firing squad in the US since 1976, with the other four happening in Utah.
The first execution by firing squad in the United States in 15 years was carried out in South Carolina on March 7, when a man convicted of murdering his ex-girlfriend’s parents was put to death.
A three-person squad of Department of Corrections volunteers opens fire on the condemned man, who is restrained in a chair with a hood over his head 15 feet away.
Mikal Mahdi, 42, is to be executed at 6pm (10pm UK time) at a prison in state capital Columbia for the murder of 56-year-old police captain James Myers
Mahdi chose the firing squad, which is an uncommon choice and only the fifth time a prisoner was executed by firing squad in the US since 1976, with the other four happening in Utah (set up in a Utah prison where an inmate was executed by firing squad in 2010 is pictured above)
Members of South Carolinians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty speak before presenting petitions to South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster asking him to grant clemency to Mikal Mahdi before his firing squad execution on April 10, 2025, in Columbia, South Carolina
Mahdi has requested clemency from Governor Henry McMaster but South Carolina’s Republican chief executive has not granted any previous clemency petitions.
‘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.’
Mahdi was sentenced to death after he admitted to killing Orangeburg Public Safety officer James Myers in 2004, shooting him nine times before burning his body.
Myers’ wife found him in the couple’s Calhoun County shed, which had been the backdrop to their wedding 15 months earlier.
Myers’ shed was a short distance through the woods from a gas station where Mahdi tried but failed to buy gas with a stolen credit card and left behind a vehicle he had carjacked in Columbia.
Mahdi was arrested in Florida while driving Myers’ unmarked police pickup truck.
This March 2019 photo provided by the South Carolina Department of Corrections shows the state’s electric chair in Columbia, S.C
Mahdi also admitted to the killing three days earlier of Christopher Boggs, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, convenience store clerk who was shot twice in the head as he checked Mahdi’s ID. Mahdi was sentenced to life in prison for that killing.
Mahdi’s final appeal was rejected this week by the South Carolina Supreme Court. He also sent his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has not ruled.
His lawyers said Mahdi’s original attorneys put on a shallow case trying to spare his life that didn’t call on relatives, teachers or others who knew him and ignored the impact of months spent in solitary confinement in prison as a teen.
The defense’s case to spare Mahdi’s life before a judge lasted only about 30 minutes. It ‘didn’t even span the length of a Law & Order episode, and was just as superficial,’ Mahdi’s lawyers wrote.
Mahdi’s earliest memory was his father slamming his mother through a glass table and later lying to his son and saying his mother was dead.
Mahdi’s father pulled him out of school in fifth grade when officials suggested he needed behavioral help, defense lawyers said.
Prosecutors said Mahdi constantly uses brutality to solve his problems. As a death row prisoner, he stabbed a guard and hit another worker with a concrete block.
Mahdi was caught three times with tools he could have used to escape, including a piece of sharpened metal that could be used as a knife, according to prison records.
Mahdi has requested clemency from Governor Henry McMaster but South Carolina’s Republican chief executive has not granted any previous clemency petitions
At his execution on Friday night, the curtain will open at 6pm in the death chamber at a Columbia prison with fewer than a dozen witnesses sitting behind bulletproof glass.
Mahdi will be strapped into a chair. A white square with a red bull’s-eye will be over his heart, placed by a doctor with a stethoscope. His lawyer can read Mahdi’s final statement if he has one.
A prison employee will then place a hood over Mahdi’s head, walk across the small room and pull open a black shade where the prison employees who volunteered for the firing squad will be stationed.
Without an audible or visual warning to witnesses, the shooters will fire high-powered rifles at Mahdi from 15 feet away, about the distance from a basketball backboard to the free-throw line.
They all will have live bullets that shatter and splinter when they hit something firm, like a rib cage. A doctor will then come out within a minute or two, examine Mahdi and declare him dead.
The firing squad is an execution method with a long and violent history around the world.
Death in a hail of bullets has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
But South Carolina lawmakers saw it as the quickest and most humane way to kill an inmate, especially with the uncertainty in obtaining lethal injection drugs.
Brad Sigmon, 67, was put to death by firing squad at 6.05pm on March 7 at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina
South Carolina gives Death Row inmates a choice between lethal injection, the electric chair or the firing squad
He will be the fifth inmate executed by South Carolina in less than eight months as the state makes its way through prisoners who ran out of appeals during an unintended 13-year pause on the death penalty.
There have been 11 executions in the United States so far this year and Mahdi will be the 12th. There were 25 last year.
The vast majority of US executions since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 have been performed using lethal injection.
Alabama and Louisiana have killed inmates by nitrogen gas. Florida, Oklahoma, Arizona and Texas have executed men by lethal injection, while South Carolina has used both the firing squad and lethal injection.
The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states, while three others – California, Oregon and Pennsylvania – have moratoriums in place.
President Donald Trump is a proponent of capital punishment and on his first day in office called for an expansion of its use ‘for the vilest crimes.’
Attorney General Pam Bondi announced last week that federal prosecutors would seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, charged with the high-profile December 4 murder in New York of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
