Inset: Mikal Mahdi (South Carolina Department of Corrections). Background: In this June 18, 2010, file photo, the firing squad execution chamber at the Utah State Prison in Draper, Utah, is shown (AP Photo/Trent Nelson, Pool, File).
A South Carolina man executed last month by firing squad experienced “excruciating conscious pain and suffering” for up to a minute before his death due to a “massive botch” by the shooters, who “largely missed his heart,” according to the inmate’s lawyers.
“The implications of this botch are horrifying,” writes Mikal Madhi’s legal team in a status report and “Notice of Botched Execution” filed with the South Carolina Supreme Court. The filing lists the respondent as the state’s former Department of Corrections (SCDC) director, Bryan Stirling, who stepped down from his position at the end of April.
The document cites a third-party autopsy report commissioned by the SCDC that shows several alleged mistakes committed by the department shooters during Mahdi’s April 11 execution, including their low placement of shots, according to Mahdi’s attorneys. The shooters fired two shots instead of three, as required, and their actions ultimately led to the “suffering” that Madhi experienced, his lawyers claim.
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One of the pathologists from the autopsy, Dr. Jonathan Arden, reported that Madhi appeared to have two half-inch wounds that were “just above the border with the abdomen, which is not an area largely overlying the heart,” according to the Supreme Court notice.
“The autopsy also documents two distinct wound paths that traveled ‘downward and to the right’ inside Mr. Mahdi’s torso, ‘macerat[ing] the left lobe of the liver and the pancreas’ and ‘the left lower lung lobe’ before crashing into his spine and ribs,” the document says, quoting Arden’s report.
“Along the way, bullet fragments made ‘two perforations of the right ventricle of [Mr. Mahdi’s] heart, comprising two holes in the front, and two holes in the back,’ leaving it otherwise intact,” the notice adds.
Mahdi had been on death row for a 2004 multistate crime spree which included three alleged murders, two of which he was tried and found guilty.
“As his advocates, and as officers of the Court, we feel obliged to share this information with you, and with other condemned prisoners who will face this same dilemma,” Mahdi’s lawyers said. “Mr. Mahdi elected the firing squad, and this Court sanctioned it, based on the assumption that SCDC could be entrusted to carry out its straightforward steps: locating the heart; placing a target over it; and hitting that target. That confidence was clearly misplaced.”
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