COLUMBIA, SC — According to a pathologist hired by the man’s lawyers, the man who was killed by a firing squad in South Carolina last month was awake and probably in terrible pain for up to a minute after the shots meant to stop his heart quickly hit him lower than planned.
Lawyers said it was a botched execution because they think either the volunteer prison staff who all had live bullets missed or the target wasn’t put in the right place.
A pathologist’s report, which was sent to the state Supreme Court on Thursday along with a photo of Mikal Mahdi’s torso after he was executed on April 11, says that there were only two clear wounds on his body.
Mahdi decided to be killed by a firing squad over being put to death by lethal injection or electricity for killing a police officer while they were off duty in 2004.
Corrections Department spokeswoman Chrysti Shane said Thursday that all three guns fired at the same time, and officials at the jail think that all three bullets hit Mahdi, with two going into his body at the same spot and following the same path. It has happened before when the shooting squad does its job and shoots at the prisoner from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.
A pathologist hired by lawyers for condemned prisoners said that the autopsy didn’t provide enough independent evidence to support that conclusion. This is because only one photo of the body was taken, and Mahdi’s clothes weren’t looked at.
“The shooters missed their target, and the evidence shows that he was hit by two bullets instead of the required three.” Because of this, the internal damage from the gunshot wounds made the death process last longer, Dr. Jonathan Arden said.
Arden said that most likely meant Mahdi lost consciousness in 30 to 60 seconds, which is two to four times longer than the 15 seconds that Arden and experts hired by the state said a proper fire squad execution would take.
Arden said that during that time, Mahdi would have been in unbearable pain as his lungs tried to expand and move into his broken sternum and ribs. He would also have been suffering from “air hunger” as his damaged lungs struggled to bring in oxygen.
The shooting squad was chosen by Mr. Mahdi, and the Court approved it because it was thought that SCDC could be trusted to do its simple tasks: find the heart, set a target over it, and hit that target. In a message to the South Carolina Supreme Court, Mahdi’s lawyers said, “That trust was clearly misplaced.”
People who were there heard him scream as shots were fired.
People who were there heard Mahdi cry out as the shots were fired. He then groaned again 45 seconds later and let out one last low moan just before he seemed to take his last breath at 75 seconds.
Mahdi, 42, was put to death after admitting that he killed Orangeburg Police Officer James Myers in 2004 by shooting him at least eight times and then setting his body on fire. His wife discovered him in the shed in Calhoun County where the couple had their wedding 15 months before.
Arden wrote in a report that the official autopsy did not include X-rays so that the results could be checked by someone else. There was also only one photo of Mahdi’s body and no close-ups of the wounds. Finally, his clothing was not looked at to see where the target was placed and how it lined up with the damage the bullets did to his shirt.