Mikal Mahdi was executed by firing squad on April 11 in South Carolina. It was only the second by that method in 15 years there, and it showed: the firing squad botched it, failing to hit his heart and leaving him to "bleed out" for a minute or more in "excruciating conscious pain and suffering."
Mikal Mahdi died on April 11 after being shot by a three-person firing squad. But an autopsy revealed two wounds on his chest, not three. None of the bullets hit his heart directly, as is supposed to happen during the execution. Instead, the wounds caused damage to his liver and other internal organs, and allowed his heart to keep beating. … "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."
Mahdi murdered two convenience store clerks and an off-duty police officer. Missing from feet away looks an awful lot like the executioners ("the target seemed to be placed low on Mahdi's chest") making a decision about how he should die. South Carolina's Supreme Court permitted the firing squad last year with the ruling that it was not cruel or unusual so long as the convict died within 15 seconds.
"the pain will last only ten to fifteen seconds … Dr. Arden's testimony establishes that the outer limit of the period of time in which an inmate will suffer pain—unless there is a massive botch of the execution in which each member of the firing squad simply misses the inmate's heart—is hardly more than fifteen seconds."
The goalposts of What Do You Mean It Actually Happened are rarely left unmoved.
