South Carolina Carries Out 2nd Firing Squad Execution After Supreme Court Declines to Intervene

The U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay of execution earlier in the day.

FILE - In this undated photo provided by the South Carolina Department of Corrections, viewing chairs are placed in the witness room of the execution chamber in the Broad River Correctional Institute in Columbia, S.C. South Carolina Department of Corrections via AP, File

South Carolina performed its second firing squad execution on April 11, after the U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay of execution earlier in the day.

Inmate Mikal Mahdi was pronounced dead at 6:05 p.m. local time at a correctional facility in Columbia. Mahdi opted for the firing squad, instead of the other execution methods available in South Carolina—the electric chair or lethal injection.

A spokesman for South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster confirmed to The Epoch Times that Mahdi’s request for clemency had been denied. Before that, on April 8, the state’s Supreme Court also declined to halt the execution.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s order in the case did not explain the decision. No justices dissented. Mahdi also filed a petition seeking oral argument in the case. It was also denied in the same order.

Brad Sigmon was executed on March 7 by firing squad in South Carolina, becoming the first inmate to face that method of execution in 15 years in the United States.

Mahdi was sentenced to death in December 2006 after being convicted of murder.

Mahdi participated in a multi-state crime spree in July 2004 that began in Virginia and ended in Florida, according to the state’s April 9 brief.

According to the brief, “Mahdi’s callous murder of a convenience store clerk in North Carolina was captured in chilling detail on store surveillance.”

After abandoning a stolen vehicle at a gas station, Mahdi came upon the farm of Captain James Myers, a veteran law enforcement officer and fireman. He broke into a work shop and took two firearms he found there, the brief said.

After waiting for Myers to come home, he shot him nine times with a .22 caliber rifle, poured diesel fuel on the body, and set it on fire. He fled with Myers’s police-issued truck, taking weapons with him. Police apprehended him days later in Florida, according to the brief.

In his April 7 petition filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, Mahdi argued that he failed to receive effective representation from legal counsel.

“Mikal Mahdi faces execution even though the mitigating evidence presented by his defense counsel filled barely 15 transcript pages,” the petition said.

This photo provided by the South Carolina Department of Corrections shows Mikal Mahdi. South Carolina Department of Corrections via AP

During the sentencing process, a mitigating factor is a fact that supports reducing a sentence. An aggravating factor, by contrast, is a fact that supports increasing the severity of a sentence.

“The state supreme court has upheld Mikal’s death sentence only because it has never properly applied this Court’s Sixth Amendment precedent, which explicitly deems capital trial counsel deficient when they uncover indications of childhood trauma and look no further,” the petition said.

In a separate motion filed with the U.S. Supreme Court on April 7, Mahdi reiterated his argument that poor legal representation resulted in his constitutional rights being violated.

“Had Mahdi’s trial counsel not given up before they began, the sentencing judge would have learned of Mahdi’s violent and traumatic childhood, and the torturous isolation he endured through thousands of hours of solitary confinement when he was just a teenager,” the motion said.

Because the death sentence “is the product of these stark violations of his Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment rights, this Court should stay his execution and grant [the petition],” the motion said.

The judicial system “has an interest in granting the petition to carefully and deliberately review Mahdi’s Sixth Amendment claim because, ‘to work effectively, it is important that society’s criminal process satisfy the appearance of justice,’” the motion said, citing the 1980 Supreme Court precedent of Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia.

At worst, the state will experience a minor delay in carrying out the execution while the U.S. Supreme Court considers Mahdi’s case, the motion said.

In its brief, the state argued the execution should move forward because the justices were unlikely to grant the petition now after rejecting Mahdi’s previous petition in February 2017.

“There is no compelling reason to believe that this Court would look more favorably upon this issue now that it has been raised at the eleventh hour.”