Lawyers for man executed by firing squad in South Carolina say bullets mostly missed his heart

COLUMBIA, S.C. — A man who was put to death last month in South Carolina's second firing squad execution was conscious and likely suffered in extreme pain for as long as a minute after the bullets, meant to quickly stop his heart, struck him lower than expected, according to a pathologist hired by his attorneys.

The lawyers called it a botched execution because they think either the volunteer prison employees who all had live ammunition missed or the target was not placed properly.

An autopsy photo of Mikal Mahdi's torso showed only two distinct wounds at the April 11 execution, according to the pathologist's report, which was filed Thursday with a letter to the state Supreme Court.

Mahdi chose to be executed by firing squad over lethal injection or electrocution in the killing of an off-duty police officer in 2004.

All three guns fired simultaneously and prison officials believe all three bullets hit Mahdi with two of them entering his body at the same spot and following the same path, Corrections Department spokeswoman Chrysti Shane said Thursday. That has happened before when the firing squad team practices its job to fire at the inmate from 15 feet (4.6 meters) away.

A pathologist hired by attorneys for condemned inmates said there isn't enough independent evidence from the autopsy — where only one photo of the body was taken and Mahdi's clothes weren't examined — to make that conclusion.

''The shooters missed the intended target area and the evidence indicates that he was struck by only two bullets, not the prescribed three. Consequently, the nature of the internal injuries from the gunshot wounds resulted in a more prolonged death process,'' Dr. Jonathan Arden said.

Arden said that likely meant Mahdi took 30 to 60 seconds to lose consciousness — two to four times longer than the 15 seconds that experts including Arden and ones hired by the state predicted for a properly conducted firing squad execution.

During that time Mahdi would have suffered excruciating pain as his lungs tried to expand and move into a broken sternum and ribs, as well as from ''air hunger'' as the damaged lungs struggled and failed to bring in needed oxygen, Arden 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,'' Mahdi's attorneys wrote in the letter to the South Carolina Supreme Court.

Witnesses heard him cry out as shots were fired

Witnesses to the execution heard Mahdi cry out as the shots were fired, groan again some 45 seconds later and let out one last low moan just before he appeared to draw his final breath at 75 seconds.

Mahdi, 42, was executed after admitting he killed 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 the backdrop to their wedding 15 months earlier.

The official autopsy did not include X-rays to allow the results to be independently verified; only one photo was taken of Mahdi's body, and no close-ups of the wounds; and his clothing was not examined to determine where the target was placed and how it aligned with the damage the bullets caused to his shirt, Arden said in a report summarizing his findings.

''I noticed where the target was placed on Mikal's torso, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘I'm certainly not an expert in human anatomy, but it appears to me that target looks low,''' said David Weiss, an attorney for Mahdi who was also a witness at his death.

A prison worker performs a chest X-ray on an inmate and a medical professional uses a stethoscope to place the target over the heart, Shain said.

Official autopsy report called into question

In the official autopsy report, pathologist Dr. Bradley Marcus wrote that the reason there were only two wounds is that one was caused by two bullets entering the body at the same spot.

Arden called that virtually unheard of in his 40 years of examining dead bodies and said Marcus told him in a conversation that the possibility was remote.

The autopsy found damage in only one of the four chambers of Mahdi's heart — the right ventricle. There was extensive damage to his liver and pancreas as the bullets continued down.

''The entrance wounds were at the lowest area of the chest, just above the border with the abdomen, which is an area not largely overlying the heart,'' Arden wrote.

In their conversation Marcus also said the severe amount of liver damage was not anticipated and he ''expected the entrance wounds to be higher on the chest,'' Arden wrote in his report.

Marcus declined to talk about the autopsy when reached by phone Thursday morning.

Autopsy on first man killed by firing squad showed obliterated heart

In contrast the autopsy on Brad Sigmon, the first man killed by firing squad in the state, showed three distinct bullet wounds and his heart was obliterated, Arden said. He added that the autopsy report in that case included X-rays, adequate photos and a cursory examination of his clothes.

Without X-rays or other internal scans to follow the path of the bullets through Mahdi's body, no additional light could be shed on the two-bullets-through-one-hole claim, Arden said.

Weiss said he was stunned that so little was done in the autopsy even after the pathologist saw only two holes in his chest. The apparent errors in how the execution was carried out are a major problem, he asserted.

''I think that raises incredibly difficult questions about the type of training and oversight that is going into this process,'' Weiss said.

''It was obvious to me as a lay person upon reading his autopsy report that something went wrong here. We should want to figure out what it was that went wrong when you've got state government carrying out the most serious, most grave possible type of function,'' Weiss said.

Mahdi's body was cremated preventing a second autopsy, Weiss said.

South Carolina allows condemned inmates to chose method of death

South Carolina allows condemned inmates to choose whether to die by lethal injection, electric chair or firing squad. Three in the past year have chosen lethal injection, but the past two opted for the firing squad, saying they feared the other methods — autopsies have shown that lethal injection causes a rush of fluid into the lungs, and burns have been found on bodies after electrocutions.

''The purpose of South Carolina's choice provisions is to guarantee ‘that a condemned inmate in South Carolina will never be subjected to execution by a method he contends is more inhumane than another method that is available,''' Mahdi's lawyers wrote, quoting the state Supreme Court's decision to allow executions. ''An understanding of how this botch occurred is essential for that choice to have any meaning at all.''

Twenty-six people remain on South Carolina's death row. Stephen Stanko, who has two death sentences for murders in Horry County and Georgetown County, has run out of appeals and likely will be scheduled to die in June.