A South Carolina death row inmate has exhausted his last attempt to not be executed by firing squad, after he murdered an off-duty police officer.
Mikal Mahdi, now 41, was convicted for the 2004 killing of James Myers, an Orangeburg Public Safety officer, as reported by the New York Post. Mahdi ambushed Myers in a shed that had once served as the backdrop to the officer's wedding, shooting him at least eight times and then setting his body on fire.
Myers was off duty at the time of that attack. Three days earlier, Mahdi had shot Christopher Biggs, a North Carolina clerk, twice in the head. He was later arrested in Florida while driving Myers' stolen police truck. Mahdi pleaded guilty to Myers' murder, and was sentenced by death.
On Monday, the South Carolina Supreme Court unanimously rejected Mahdi's appeal, which argued that his defense team had not sufficiently represented him.
The appeal claimed his lawyers failed to call any character witnesses or present evidence of his troubled upbringing, including time spent in solitary confinement as a teenager. However, the court found these arguments had already been presented in past appeals and declined to revisit the case.
Mahdi is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. on April 11 at Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. He will be the second inmate in South Carolina to die by firing squad in the last month, following the execution for Brad Sigmon.
