Columbia, South Carolina
AP
—
A South Carolina death row inmate on Friday chose execution by firing squad, just five weeks after the state carried out its first death by bullets.
Mikal Mahdi, who pleaded guilty to murder for killing a police officer in 2004, is scheduled to be executed April 11.
Mahdi, 41, had the choice of dying by firing squad, lethal injection or the electric chair. He will be the first inmate to be executed in the state since Brad Sigmon chose to be shot to death on March 7. A doctor pronounced Sigmon dead less than three minutes after three bullets tore into his heart.
“Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi has chosen the lesser of three evils,” one of his lawyers, David Weiss, said in a statement. “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.”
MORE:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/28/us/mikal-mahdi-sc-firing-squad-execution/index.html