Cop killer executed by firing squad - but takes two minutes to die

A convicted police killer was controversially by aas he was left screaming in agony - and took two minutes to die. Mikal Mahdi, 42, cried out as the bullets hit him during the brutal execution. He gave no final statement and did not look to the nine witnesses in the room behind bulletproof glass. Mahdi 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 and he was declared dead at 6:05 p.m., less than four minutes after the shots were fired in South Carolina. In a statement Mahdi’s lawyer, David Weiss, called the execution a “horrifying act that belongs in the darkest chapters of history, not in a civilised society.” Mahdi’s final appeal was rejected this week by both the US and South Carolina Supreme Courts.

Mahdi had the choice of dying by firing squad, lethal injection or the electric chair. “Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi has chosen the lesser of three evils,” Weiss said. “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.”

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Mahdi is the fifth inmate executed by South Carolina in less than eight months. Mahdi had admitted killing Orangeburg Public Safety officer James Myers in 2004, shooting him at least eight times before burning his body.

Myers’ wife found him in the couple’s Calhoun County shed, which had been near their wedding 15 months earlier. He also admitted to the killing three days earlier of Christopher Boggs, a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, convenience store clerk who was shot twice in the head as he checked Mahdi’s ID. Mahdi was sentenced to life in prison for that killing.