A second South Carolina death row inmate chooses execution by firing squad

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina death row inmate on Friday chose execution by firing squad, just five weeks after the state carried out its first death by bullets.

Mikal Mahdi, who pleaded guilty to murder for killing a police officer in 2004, is scheduled to be executed April 11.

Mahdi, 41, had the choice of dying by firing squad, lethal injection or the electric chair. He will be the first inmate to be executed in the state since Brad Sigmon chose to be shot to death on March 7. A doctor pronounced Sigmon dead less than three minutes after three bullets tore into his heart.

“Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi has chosen the lesser of three evils," one of his lawyers, David Weiss, said in a statement. "Mikal chose the firing squad instead of being burned and mutilated in the electric chair, or suffering a lingering death on the lethal injection gurney.”

Mahdi ambushed Orangeburg public safety officer James Myers at the officer's shed in Calhoun County in July 2004. Myers had just returned from an out-of-town birthday celebration for his wife, sister and daughter, prosecutors said.

Myers’ wife found his burned body, shot at least eight times including twice in the head, in the shed that had been the backdrop for their wedding less than 15 months earlier, authorities said.

Mahdi will be strapped to a chair 15 feet (4.6 meters) from three prison employees who volunteered to be on the firing squad. A target will be placed on his chest. Their rifles will all be loaded with a live round that shatters when it hits his rib cage.

Aside from Sigmon, only three other U.S. inmates — all in Utah — have been killed by a firing squad in the past 50 years. Sigmon was the first inmate killed by bullets in the U.S. since 2010.

Mahdi’s lawyers have filed a final appeal with the state’s highest court, saying Mahdi’s case for a life sentence at his original trial took only 30 minutes and that his lawyers failed to call anyone who could testify on his behalf.

It “didn’t even span the length of a Law & Order episode, and was just as superficial,” they said.

Several defense lawyer organizations have filed briefs saying no one should be executed after such little effort to defend them.

Mahdi’s lawyers said that as a juvenile Mahdi spent months in isolation in prison and that this altered his developing brain and affected his judgement.

After Mahdi pleaded guilty to murder, Judge Clifton Newman said he sentenced the young man to death because a sense of humanity he tried to find in every defendant seemed not to exist in Mahdi.

Prosecutors responded to the claim of a poor defense by saying Mahdi was able to present much more evidence during a 2011 appeal that had to be heard inside a prison because Mahdi had stabbed a death row guard during in an escape attempt. A judge rejected the appeal.

“In Mahdi’s vernacular, if his mitigation presentation before Judge Newman ‘didn’t even span the length of a Law & Order episode,’ the review of any potential error is in its 24th season,” the state Attorney General’s Office wrote in court papers.

Prosecutors said a lot of the new evidence would help Mahdi's case, including a string of attacks and threats on prison employees; his guilty plea to killing a convenience store clerk in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, before the South Carolina killing; and two other deaths that authorities in Virginia think he may be connected to.

“The nature of the man is violence,” prosecutors wrote.

Mahdi has one more opportunity to live — he can ask Republican Gov. Henry McMaster to reduce his sentence to life in prison without parole just minutes before his scheduled execution at 6 p.m. on April 11 at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia.

But no South Carolina governor has offered clemency in the 47 executions in the state since the death penalty resumed in the U.S. in 1976.

In the past seven months, South Carolina has executed Freddie Owens on Sept. 20; Richard Moore on Nov. 1; Marion Bowman Jr. on Jan. 31; and Sigmon.

FILE - This undated photo provided by the South Carolina Department of Corrections shows the witness room in the execution chamber at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, S.C. (South Carolina Department of Corrections via AP, File)

FILE - This undated photo provided by the South Carolina Department of Corrections shows the execution room at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, S.C. (South Carolina Department of Corrections via AP, File)

FILE. This March 2019 photo provided by the South Carolina Department of Corrections shows the state's electric chair in Columbia, S.C. (Kinard Lisbon/South Carolina Department of Corrections via AP, File)

FILE - This photo provided by the South Carolina Department of Corrections shows the state's death chamber in Columbia, S.C., including the electric chair, right, and a firing squad chair, left. The South Carolina Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2024, on whether the state can use the electric chair, firing squad or a new lethal injection protocol to carry out its first executions in nearly 13 years. (South Carolina Department of Corrections via AP, File)

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia targeted eight regions of Ukraine in its latest nighttime drone and missile barrage, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday, with local authorities reporting that the strikes wounded more than two dozen civilians, including three children.

Russian forces fired 524 attack drones and 22 ballistic and cruise missiles, Zelenskyy said. The city of Dnipro and the surrounding central region of Ukraine bore the brunt of the attack, officials said.

The barrage continued a recent spiral of long-range strikes that have grown in scale following a May 9-11 ceasefire that U.S. President Donald Trump said he asked Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin to observe but which had little impact. There is no sign a peace deal is taking shape despite U.S. diplomatic efforts to end Russia's invasion.

Russia hammered Ukraine over several days last week, flattening a Kyiv apartment building where 24 people died.

One of Ukraine’s largest drone strikes on Russia killed at least four people, including three near Moscow, and wounded a dozen others, authorities said Sunday.

In more than four years of war, Ukraine has built up its own long-range capabilities. It has been hitting oil facilities that represent a vital part of the Russian economy, as well as other targets deep inside Russia, making the Russian public take notice. That has increased the pressure on Putin, whose army is struggling to make progress on the battlefield and who claimed earlier this month, without providing evidence, that the war is approaching its end.

On Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry said that more than 1,000 Ukrainian drones had been shot down or jammed in the previous 24 hours, with around 80 on their way to Moscow.

In another significant enhancement of Ukraine’s long-range arsenal, Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said Monday that the country has developed its first glide bomb — a powerful weapon that has regularly been deployed to devastating effect by Russia.

The Ukrainian version carries a 250-kilogram (550-pound) warhead and is designed to strike fortifications, command posts and other targets dozens of kilometers (miles) behind the front line, he said. Ukrainian pilots are currently training with the weapon under combat conditions.

Zelenskyy claims a significant shift is taking place.

“Our long-range capabilities are significantly changing the situation — and, more broadly, the world’s perception of Russia’s war,” Zelenskyy said on X late Sunday. “Many partners are now signaling that they see what is happening and how everything has changed — both in attitudes toward this war and in the reachability of Russian targets on Russian territory.”

At the same time, Russia’s aerial onslaughts are stretching Ukraine’s air defenses.

The Defense Ministry in Moscow said Monday it had dealt Ukraine a massive blow overnight with precision ground- and sea-based missiles and drones, striking weapons factories, oil and energy facilities, as well as transport and port infrastructure used by the Ukrainian armed forces. It said the goal of the strike had been achieved and all the designated targets had been hit.

Putin is due to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing this week. Cooperation between the two countries has deepened in recent years as many Western countries have sought to isolate the Russian leader, with China growing to become Russia's main trading partner.

In the meantime, Ukraine’s navy claimed that a Russian drone struck a Chinese-owned cargo ship in the Black Sea near Odesa on Monday.

The drone hit the dry cargo vessel KSL Deyang, which was sailing under a Marshall Islands flag, the Ukrainian Navy said in a Telegram post. The ship’s owner is based in China, and the crew consists of Chinese nationals, the navy said. There was no immediate word on casualties or the extent of damage to the vessel.

In other developments Monday:

The bail for Andriy Yermak, Zelenskyy’s former chief of staff, has been paid in full, Ukraine’s High Anti-Corruption Court said Monday, according to Ukrainian media. The court last week set bail for Yermak at 140 million hryvnias (roughly $3.2 million)

Yermak was named by two Ukrainian anti-corruption watchdogs as a suspect in a major graft probe. The move was a step short of formally charging Yermak, who resigned in November.

Investigators say Zelenskyy is not under suspicion in the case.

Hatton reported from Lisbon, Portugal.

Follow the AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Emergency Services on Monday, May 18, 2026, a rescue worker puts out a fire of a residential building damaged after a Russian strike on Dnipro, Ukraine. (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP)

In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Emergency Services on Monday, May 18, 2026, a residential building is seen damaged after a Russian strike on Dnipro, Ukraine. (Ukrainian Emergency Service via AP)