Execution set for SC cop killer Mikal Mahdi. He would be third person executed this year
The third person this year has been scheduled to be executed in South Carolina.
Mikal Mahdi, who senselessly killed two people including a South Carolina police officer during a crime spree, is scheduled to be executed on April 11, according to a notice issued today by the South Carolina Supreme Court.
If Mahdi is executed, he would be the fifth person killed by South Carolina since the state resumed execution in September 2024 following a 13 year pause.
South Carolina put an unofficial pause on executions in 2013 after the state ran out of the drugs needed to perform lethal injections, the only method allowed by state law at the time. But beginning in 2021, state legislators made a focused push to restart the death penalty by reintroducing the electric chair, adding the firing squad as an option for executions and then altering the state’s lethal injection protocol to require only a single dose of the powerful sedative pentobarbital.
But experts and recent legal filings have raised concerns about whether execution by an overdose of pentobarbital causes the individual’s lungs to fill with fluid with they are still conscious, resulting in an unusually cruel death.
So far, three of four people on death row have chosen to die by lethal injection. The most recent, Brad Sigmon, chose death by firing squad because of concerns about the lethal injection protocol.
Mahdi was sentenced to death in 2006 for the murder of Orangeburg police captain James Edward Meyers in 2004. At the time of the murder, Mahdi was already on the run after having killed a North Carolina convenience store clerk, Christopher Boggs, over a can of beer. After carjacking a driver in Columbia, Mahdi fled on foot from suspicious employees of a gas station before making his way to a property owned by Meyers in Calhoun County.
There, he found several guns belonging to Meyers and decided to lie in wait for the off duty police officer to return. He then shot Meyers repeatedly before setting his body on fire.
Unusually, Mahdi was sentenced to death by Judge Clifton Newman after pleading guilty. But prosecutors pointed out that Mahdi had only pleaded guilty after it was discovered that he was in possession of a homemade handcuff key.