[ABC] COLUMBIA, S.C. -- Long a method of execution associated with political terror or military justice, a firing squad is set to kill a South Carolina inmate on Friday, the second time the state will have carried out that method in the past five weeks.Mikal Mahdi was sentenced to die 20 years ago for the ambush killing of an off-duty police officer. He will be the fifth inmate executed by South Carolina in less than eight months as the state makes its way through prisoners who ran out of appeals during an unintended 13-year pause on the death penalty.
Mahdi, 42, chose to die by three bullets to the heart instead of lethal injection or the electric chair. On March 7, Brad Sigmon was executed in the first U.S. firing squad death in 15 years and only the fourth since 1976. The others all occurred in Utah.
The firing squad is an execution method with a long and violent history around the world. Death in a hail of bullets has been used to punish mutinies and desertion in armies, as frontier justice in America’s Old West and as a tool of terror and political repression in the former Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
But South Carolina lawmakers saw it as the quickest and most humane way to kill an inmate, especially with the uncertainty in obtaining lethal injection drugs.