A second person on South Carolina’s death row has chosen to be executed by firing squad
Mikal Mahdi, who killed a South Carolina police officer during a multi-state crime spree, has chosen to die by firing squad. He is only the second person in the state to choose to die this way since it was added as a method of execution by the state legislature in 2021.
He is scheduled to be executed on April 11.
South Carolina law requires that death row inmates choose their method of execution between the electric chair, lethal injection and firing squad. If they do not make a choice, the electric chair is considered the default.
“Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi has chosen the lesser of three evils. Mikal chose the firing squad instead of being burned and mutilated in the electric chair, or suffering a lingering death on the lethal injection gurney,” said one of Mahdi’s attorneys, David Weiss, assistant federal public defender at the Capital Habeas Unit for the Fourth Circuit Federal Public Defender’s Office.
The firing squad was added as an option for execution in South Carolina after state legislators passed a law to reintroduce the electric chair in order to resume carrying out executions. The state was forced to stop carrying out the death penalty in 2013 after it ran out of the drugs used in the traditional three drug lethal injection cocktail.
Meanwhile, lawyers for Mahdi are attempting to win their client a stay of execution. In recent filings to the South Carolina Supreme Court, they argued that his attorneys at his original sentencing trial only put up a “superficial” defense.
They failed to present evidence of the years of abuse Mahdi suffered at his father’s hands, which led to intense thoughts of suicide. These “inexperienced” attorneys also failed to mention the ten months that he spent in solitary confinement during multiple stints in juvenile detention and later Virginia state prison for multiple crimes from the ages of 14 to 21. Spending so much time in solitary confinement damaged his already fragile mental health, his current legal team argued.
But Mahdi’s legal team faces an uphill challenge. Of the six men who were scheduled to be executed when the state Supreme Court ruled that executions could resume last year, the court has only granted one man, Steven Bixby, a stay of execution.
They must also contend with the senseless brutality of Mahdi’s crimes. Former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Toal described his crimes as “heinous” and “egregious.” In an opinion upholding Mahdi’s sentence in a previous appeal, Toal wrote, “in my time on this Court, I have seen few cases where the extraordinary penalty of death was so deserved.”
In 2004, Mahdi, then 21, began a multi-state crime spree in his home state of Virginia shortly after being released from prison. According to court records, he stole a station wagon, a set of license plates and a .380 caliber pistol and began making his way south. In North Carolina, he shot and killed convenience store clerk Christopher Boggs, 26, over a can of beer. He failed to break into the cash register and left with the beer, according to court records.
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 James Meyers in Calhoun County.
There, he found several guns belonging to Meyers, a captain in the Orangeburg Department of Public Safety, 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.
Mahdi was arrested in Satellite Beach, Florida, following a manhunt.
This story was originally published March 28, 2025 at 11:33 AM.