South Carolina firing squad ‘botched’ execution of cop killer Mikal Mahdi as bullets missed heart, left him alive ‘longer than was intended’

A South Carolina firing squad tried to shoot a convicted cop killer in the heart and missed in a “botched” execution that left him in “excruciating” pain as he bled out, according to an autopsy and experts.

Mikal Mahdi, 42 —  who murdered a South Carolina police officer during a crime spree in 2004 — was shot to death by a three-person firing squad on April 11.

But an autopsy later revealed that none of the bullets hit his heart directly, and that his chest showed only two bullet wounds instead of three, according to a disturbing report by NPR.

The bullets that struck him injured his liver and other internal organs and allowed his heart to keep beating as he remained alive for roughly a minute, experts said.

“Mr. Mahdi did experience excruciating conscious pain and suffering for about 30 to 60 seconds after he was shot,” pathologist Dr. Jonathan Arden wrote in his analysis of the state autopsy.

Arden, who was hired by Mahdi’s lawyers to review the autopsy, added that Mahdi was “alive and reacting longer than was intended or expected.”

In July 2004, Mahdi went on a multi-state crime spree — committing carjacking, firearm robbery, and three murders, including that of 56-year-old off-duty police officer James Myers, who was shot at least eight times before his body was burned.

“He’s not going to die instantaneously from this,” said Dr. Carl Wigren, a forensic pathologist who reviewed the autopsy documents for NPR. “I think that it took him some time to bleed out.”

On May 8, lawyers for Mahdi told the South Carolina Supreme Court that the execution was “botched,” citing the state’s autopsy and a forensic report.

The constitution in South Carolina bans cruel or unusual punishment — but the state’s Supreme Court ruled last year that firing squad executions were not cruel because a prisoner would not suffer longer than 15 seconds.

“The evidence before us convinces us — though an inmate executed via the firing squad is likely to feel pain, perhaps excruciating pain — that the pain will last only ten to fifteen seconds,” the justices wrote.

“Unless there is a massive botch of the execution in which each member of the firing squad simply misses the inmate’s heart.”

In March, the death row inmate chose execution by firing squad, just five weeks after the state carried out its first death by bullets.

A doctor noted in the comments section on the state autopsy that “it is believed that” two bullets went through one wound. 

But pathologists who reviewed were skeptical that two bullets went through precisely the same small hole.

“I think the odds of that are pretty minuscule,” Wigren said.

Jeffrey Collins, a reporter for the Associated Press, wrote that he heard Mahdi groan twice about 45 seconds after shots. He continued to breathe for another 80 seconds before he appeared to take a final gasp, Collins wrote.

“Both the forensic medical evidence and the reported eyewitness observations of the execution corroborate that Mr. Mahdi was alive and reacting longer than was intended or expected,” Arden concluded in his report.