On April 11, 2025, South Carolina executed Mikal Mahdi by firing squad, making him the second prisoner the state had put to death with that method in the previous five weeks. Mahdi, 42, gave no final statement before the shots were fired at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia.
The execution brought an end to years of litigation over a violent crime spree that included the killing of Orangeburg Public Safety officer James Myers in 2004. The source says Mahdi admitted to shooting Myers at least eight times before burning his body. It also says he admitted to killing Christopher Boggs, a convenience store clerk in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, three days earlier. Those admissions are central to why Mahdi had been on death row.
The report gives unusual detail about the execution itself. Mahdi did not look toward the witnesses behind bulletproof glass. He cried out when the shots hit him, his arms flexed, and a doctor declared him dead at 6:05 p.m., less than four minutes after the bullets were fired. The execution team consisted of three volunteers. Mahdi had chosen firing squad over lethal injection or the electric chair.
The broader legal context is just as important. Mahdi’s final appeals were rejected by both the U.S. Supreme Court and the South Carolina Supreme Court earlier that week. His lawyers argued that his original defense was too thin and had failed to present a fuller picture of his childhood, family history and time in solitary confinement as a juvenile. Prosecutors answered that Mahdi had a long record of brutality, including violence in prison while awaiting execution.
South Carolina’s use of the firing squad is part of a broader shift after a long pause in executions. The state had not carried out an execution between 2011 and 2024, then resumed after lawmakers changed the law to allow the firing squad and shield the identity of drug suppliers. The source notes that Mahdi was the fifth inmate executed in the state in less than eight months and the 12th execution in the United States this year.
Mahdi’s death is therefore both a final punishment in one murder case and a marker of how South Carolina has re-entered the national death-penalty debate. The source gives the human details, the legal steps and the state’s procedural changes. It leaves little ambiguity about the outcome, only about how long the modern firing-squad revival will continue.
