(12 Apr 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Columbia, South Carolina – 11 April 2025
1. Wide of banner reading (English): "USA: 1618 executions 1977 – Present. Stop executions"
2. Wide protester outside corrections facility
3. Tight of signage reading (English): "South Carolina Department of Corrections"
4. SOUNDBITE (English) Chrysti Shain, Director of Communications, South Carolina Department of Corrections:
++PARTIALLY COVERED++
"The capital punishment sentence of Mikal Mahdi was carried out tonight pursuant to the order of the South Carolina Supreme Court and in accordance with state law. Mahdi, 41, was sentenced to death in 2006 for murder, burglary and grand larceny in the July 17, 2004, death of Orangeburg police captain James Myers. Mahdi shot and killed Myers, then burned his body several days after killing Christopher Boggs in Winston-Salem, North Carolina during a crime spree that spanned three states."
5. Wide of South Carolina Corrections Facility
6. Med of Sign reading (English): "South Carolina Department of Corrections. Safety, Service, Stewardship"
7. Med of protester holding sign reading (English): "Thou shalt not kill"
8. SOUNDBITE (English) Jeffrey Collins, The Associated Press:
++PARTIALLY COVERED++
"Curtain opened up a little after 5.59 p.m. When it opened up, Mikal Mahdi was sitting in the firing squad chair. They came out and right at 6.01 p.m., they put the hood over his head. Mahdi had a groan, I wouldn’t call it a scream, but it was like a groan or some indication of pain immediately after he was shot. And then there was also one, like, final gasp or one kind of final deep breath. Not long after that happened, I would say maybe 30 seconds, the physician came in the room with their stethoscope and, you know, did an examination. The examination took about a minute and 30 seconds. Maybe just a tad bit less. He walked away and they declared him dead at about 6.05 p.m."
9. Various of protesters outside corrections facility
10. Wide of security guards
11. Wide of fence and security
STORYLINE:
A firing squad on Friday executed a South Carolina man who killed an off-duty police officer, the second time the rare execution method has been used by the state in the past five weeks.
Mikal Mahdi gave no final statement and did not look to his right toward the nine witnesses in the room behind bulletproof glass and bars once the curtain opened.
He cried out as the shots hit him, and his arms flexed. A white target with the red bull’s-eye over Mahdi’s heart was pushed into the wound in his chest.
He groaned two more times about 45 seconds after that. His breaths continued for about 80 seconds before he appeared to take one final gasp.
A doctor checked him for a little over a minute, and he was declared dead at 6:05 p.m., less than four minutes after the shots were fired.
Mahdi, 42, chose to die by three bullets to the heart instead of lethal injection or the electric chair. On March 7, Brad Sigmon was executed in the first U.S. firing squad death in 15 years and only the fourth since 1976. The others all occurred in Utah.
The firing squad is an execution method with a long and violent history around the world. It has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
But South Carolina lawmakers saw it as the quickest and most humane way to kill an inmate, especially with the uncertainty in obtaining lethal injection drugs. Three volunteers fired the bullets that killed Mahdi.
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