South Carolina’s highest court refuses to stop second firing squad execution

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina’s highest courtroom on Monday rejected the final main enchantment from Mikal Mahdi, who’s scheduled to die by firing squad later this week for the ambush killing of an off-duty police officer.

Mahdi’s legal professionals stated his authentic attorneys placed on a shallow case attempting to spare his life that didn’t name on family, lecturers or individuals who knew him and ignored the impression of weeks spent in solitary confinement in jail as a teen.

However the state Supreme Courtroom, in a unanimous resolution, dominated that a lot of these arguments have been made in earlier unsuccessful appeals and refused to cease Friday’s scheduled execution so additional hearings might be held.

Mahdi, who admitted killing an off-duty police officer in an ambush on the officer’s Calhoun County shed, is the fifth particular person set to be executed in South Carolina in lower than eight months. All made last appeals to the state Supreme Courtroom however all have been rejected.

Mahdi has another alternative to dwell, by asking Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to cut back his sentence to life in jail with out parole simply minutes earlier than his scheduled execution time. He’s to be put to demise with three bullets to the center at 6 p.m. on April 11 on the Broad River Correctional Establishment in Columbia.

However no South Carolina governor has provided clemency within the 47 executions carried out within the state because the demise penalty resumed within the U.S. in 1976.

Mahdi, 41, was convicted of killing Orangeburg Public Security officer James Myers in 2004, capturing him at the very least eight occasions, then burning his physique. Myers’ spouse discovered him within the shed, which had been the backdrop to their marriage ceremony 15 months earlier.

Myers’ shed was a brief distance by means of the woods from a fuel station the place Mahdi tried however failed to purchase fuel with a stolen bank card and left behind a automobile he had carjacked in Columbia. Mahdi was arrested afterward in Florida whereas driving Myers’ unmarked police pickup truck.

Mahdi additionally admitted to the killing three days earlier of Christopher Biggs, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, comfort retailer clerk who was shot twice within the head as he checked Mahdi’s ID. Mahdi was sentenced to life in jail for that killing.

Mahdi pleaded responsible to killing Myers, leaving a decide underneath South Carolina regulation to determine if he can be sentenced to demise or life with out parole.

Prosecutors referred to as 28 witnesses for Circuit Courtroom Choose Clifton Newman to listen to. The protection referred to as two, in response to Mahdi’s enchantment.

The protection’s case to spare Mahdi’s life lasted solely about half-hour. It “didn’t even span the length of a Law & Order episode, and was just as superficial,” Mahdi’s legal professionals wrote.

Prosecutors stated Mahdi was in a position to current rather more proof throughout a 2011 enchantment that needed to be heard inside a jail as a result of Mahdi had stabbed a demise row guard throughout an escape try. A decide rejected the enchantment.

“In Mahdi’s vernacular, if his mitigation presentation before Judge Newman ‘didn’t even span the length of a Law & Order episode,’ the review of any potential error is in its 24th season,” the state Legal professional Normal’s Workplace wrote in courtroom papers.

As a prisoner, Mahdi has been caught 3 times with instruments he might have used to flee, together with a chunk of sharpened metallic that might be used as a knife, in response to jail data. Whereas he was on demise row, he stabbed a guard and hit one other employee with a concrete block, the data present.

“The nature of the man is violence,” prosecutors wrote.

Mahdi is to be the second inmate executed by South Carolina’s new firing squad after Brad Sigmon selected that approach to die final month.

The firing squad is an execution methodology with a lengthy and violent historical past within the U.S. and all over the world. Dying in a hail of bullets has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Previous West and as a software of terror and political repression within the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

Earlier than Sigmon’s execution final month, solely three different prisoners within the U.S. had been executed by firing squad previously 50 years. All have been in Utah, most not too long ago Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010.

Three jail workers who volunteer for the position will fireplace high-powered rifles at Mahdi from 15 ft (about 4.5 meters) away, aiming for a goal on his coronary heart.

Mahdi additionally might have chosen the electrical chair or deadly injection.