Mikal Mahdi, the man who shot a police captain nine times and set his body on fire, was executed by firing squad on Friday night at a prison in Columbia, South Carolina. . He was pronounced dead at approximately 6:05 p.m. EDT at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina.
The execution was reportedly carried out without incident, according to South Carolina Department of Corrections officials.
Mahdi, 42, received the death penalty for the 2004 murder of 56-year-old Capt. James Myers of the Orangeburg Public Safety Department. Myers was shot to death after discovering Mahdi hiding in a shed on his property. Mahdi then set the officer’s body on fire. Three days earlier, Mahdi had also murdered a convenience store clerk, to which he pleaded guilty. It comes weeks after another South Carolina inmate Brad Sigmon was also killed by firing squad – with witnesses describing how gunfire rang out after hooded Sigmon took several heavy breaths in his last moments.
In South Carolina, death row inmates are allowed to choose between lethal injection, the electric chair, and the firing squad. Mahdi chose the firing squad — a rare method of execution. His death marks only the fifth firing squad execution in the United States since 1976; the other four were carried out in Utah…