Earlier this year, South Carolina re-introduced the firing squad as an option for death row inmates on how they would like to die. This means when you’re on death row in South Carolina, you can choose between death by lethal injection, electric chair, or three prison guards shooting you in the heart. You’re spoilt for choice!
Thus far, there have been two firing squad executions in South Carolina since the method was reinstated. The first one, back in March, went pretty well, but this next one involving a guy named Mikal Mahdi was an absolute disaster that left the convict experiencing “excruciating conscious pain and suffering for about 30 to 60 seconds after he was shot.”
The idea is to shoot the death row inmate in the heart, killing him instantly. However, in the case of Mikal Mahdi last month, the three shooters kept missing their target.
Dr. Carl Wigren, a forensic pathologist who reviewed the autopsy documents said:
“He’s not going to die instantaneously from this. I think that it took him some time to bleed out. Mr. Mahdi did experience excruciating conscious pain and suffering for about 30 to 60 seconds after he was shot.”
Now before you feel too bad for Mikal Mahdi, keep in mind that he was on death row for a triple murder involving a cop who he shot 8 times then set on fire. Which could actually go some way to explaining why the firing squad “botched” his execution so badly, but I guess we’ll never know that for sure.
What makes it even worse though is that only two wounds were found in Mikal Mahdi’s body after he died, rather than three. Yup, you guessed it – one of the shooters missed completely and fired a bullet into the wall.
Neither of the other two bullets hit Mahdi’s heart, and instead the wounds caused damage to his liver and other internal organs, causing his heart to keep beating until he bled to death in excruciating fashion.
Lawyers are now using this botched execution to try and have the firing squad removed as an option altogether again. When you look at the language used by the South Carolina Supreme Court when they put the firing squad back in play, they may actually have a case:
In 2024, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that all three methods were legal, writing that the firing squad was not cruel because a prisoner would not suffer longer than 15 seconds.
“The evidence before us convinces us—though an inmate executed via the firing squad is likely to feel pain, perhaps excruciating pain—that the pain will last only ten to fifteen seconds,” the justices wrote, adding that it would be true “…unless there is a massive botch of the execution in which each member of the firing squad simply misses the inmate’s heart.”
Welp, that didn’t take long, did it? Maybe they just need to revamp the firing squad method instead of abolish it altogether? Instead of having three shooters aiming at the heart from a distance, why not just have one guy pull the trigger at point blank range at the prisoner’s head? OK, maybe that’s a bit much to ask from a prison guard on a low wage and who could potentially be traumatised for life over having to do something like that, but at least it would ensure an instant (albeit messy) death.
I guess that’s up for the experts to figure out. ‘Murica!
For the Pakistani man who was sentenced to death for posting offensive comments on Facebook, click HERE.
