Mikal Mahdi died by firing squad on April 11 at Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina.
It was, in the opinion of myself and many others, 16 years too late in coming; despite there being no evidence that he hadn’t killed the three people, including a police officer, that he was convicted of killing during a 2004 multi-state murder spree — and there being considerable evidence that he was guilty of at least one other murder — he had been filing appeals to his death penalty sentence since 2009, all quite specious.
After yet another appeal failed in 2018, a South Carolina judicial circuit solicitor said he was “probably the most dangerous and violent person I’ve ever prosecuted,” that “he places no value on human life,” and noted that while in prison, he “nearly murdered a guard on death row.”
Yet, now that he’s dead, one news outlet — and I’m going to give you a paragraph to guess which journalistic institution is responsible for this one — is wringing its hands because, as they said, Mahdi “may have suffered for an extended period of time before dying because shooters largely missed his heart, an autopsy commissioned by the state shows.”
“Mikal Mahdi died on April 11 after being shot by a three-person firing squad,” NPR reported on “All Things Considered” Thursday. (Congratulations for those of you who guessed our state-funded tote bag-hawking Pravda was involved.)
“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. Pathologists say the injuries likely caused the prisoner pain and suffering while he was still conscious.”
Lawyers for Mahdi have called the execution “botched” in a filing to the South Carolina Supreme Court.
“Mr. Mahdi did experience excruciating conscious pain and suffering for about 30 to 60 seconds after he was shot,” a pathologist commissioned by Mahdi’s lawyers said.
“It would be one thing if the previous executions had similar documentation, but they didn’t,” David Weiss, one of Mahdi’s lawyers, told NPR.
Do you support the use of the death penalty in cases like this?
“It’s not fully clear what happened. Did one of the gunmen not fire that one? Did their gun get jammed? Did they miss? We just have no idea at this point.”
It’s worth noting that the 42-year-old Mahdi chose the method over lethal injection and the electric chair, the three methods allowed under South Carolina law, according to NBC News.
I know there are many of you that are still going to side with NPR over the suffering he endured. Perhaps surprisingly, for those of you reading this, I hear you: I once was an ardent death penalty abolitionist, and I still believe its use is often promiscuous and doesn’t target the worst of the worst, in practice, but merely the defendants with the worst of the worst representation.
Those can be fixed, however. What cannot be fixed is the role retribution plays in the social contract — and why the death penalty keeps justice from returning to the state of nature, where, as Thomas Hobbes put it, punishment will be exacted in a way that is “nasty, brutish, and short.”
People focus too much on two aspects of the penal system that we have been taught are to represent the only two legitimate aspects of it: deterrence and rehabilitation.
In the first part, you are either deterred from committing crime because you do not want to go to prison, or you are deterred because you are in prison. The second function, which takes place once one is in prison, restores the prisoner to become a functional member of society once they get out, if they get out.
But the third function — retribution — is just as, if not more, crucial: We turn over the keys of justice to the state because we believe that those who have wronged us will be punished proportionately. It doesn’t always happen perfectly, but in a functional society it happens well enough that its members do not rise up against the government or decide that punishment should be taken into their own hands. It’s the essence of the social contract: deal harshly but fairly with those who have wronged us, or we will depart from this deal and deal harshly with them, fairness be damned.
Those who bray about retribution talk as if deterrence is the issue, pointing to studies where the death penalty doesn’t decrease murder. That’s not the concern: If a misdemeanor charge against someone keying a car does not statistically deter future vandalism, it’s still in the interest of the state for them to be punished, both in the interest of fairness and because a fate worse than car-keying may await the vandal if punishment is left to the hands of the individual harmed.
Having heard this argument before, I can then predict they’ll bray about the chasm between the religiosity of conservatives with the “government playing God” by taking a life.
While Judeo-Christian opinions on the matter can vary, it’s worth noting that neither God nor Jesus nor any of his prophets or disciples say that the death penalty when life imprisonment will do is unjust — not a small detail for that heavenly clique to miss if it were so theologically urgent, given that the death penalty was practiced much more frequently in the days chronicled in the 66 books of the Bible (or 73 if you’re currently celebrating a new pontiff from Chicago) — both the Old Testament (Genesis 9) and New Testament (Romans 13) explicitly grant to the government of man the right and, one might indeed argue, obligation for the just state to practice capital punishment.
Mikal Mahdi was an evil, sick man. This is beyond dispute. On July 14, 2004, Mahdi stabbed a man in Virginia after a drug deal went bad between them, killing him. He stole a vehicle and moved south, shooting and killing a convenience store clerk in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on July 15.
Then, days later, Mahdi shot and killed 56-year-old James Myers, an off-duty Orangeburg, South Carolina, police captain when he found Mahdi hiding in a shed on his property. Mahdi doused the police officer’s body in diesel and set it ablaze.
Do you know how many mentions of these disgusting murders — where the suffering lasted considerably longer than what Mahdi had to endure — there were in the story about the cop-killer’s execution on “All Things Considered,” NPR’s flagship news show?
Zero. Not a one.
Do you know how much grisly detail about Mahdi’s death was shared, to the point where this article would be NC-17 if it made it into theaters? Pretty much everything after the part I quoted.
It’s almost, to NPR’s reporters, as if he did nothing to merit this — but excuse them if they don’t share with you the lurid details of 30 to 60 seconds of suffering he endured after inflicting a lifetime of suffering on countless individuals. In an era where 26-part podcasts will examine in horrifyingly thorough, nauseatingly meticulous detail all aspects of the life of the Freezer Freeway Killer of Upper Utah back in the 1970s (or whatever), leaving out every. single. detail. of what Mahdi did to deserve capital punishment isn’t journalism, it’s anti-death penalty commentary.
The purple-haired Seattleite who makes up the archetypal member of NPR’s demographic was probably left with the impression that they killed him for stealing a candy bar; you know how those South Carolina types are. And that, ultimately, was the point.
Few men were more deserving of 30 to 60 seconds of suffering as Mikal Mahdi under the retributive function of the penal system. Leave it to a taxpayer-sucking leech of a propaganda outlet to blast out a sympathy piece for an exceptionally guilty, exceptionally depraved man who chose how he died, and ended up (maybe) suffering for a minute on earth before — if he remained unreconciled to his Creator — he started an eternity of suffering for what he did.
God may indeed have mercy on his soul, but you shouldn’t spend a moment’s care on the alleged lack of mercy offered to this man’s body during the final moments of his reprehensible stretch on earth — or a dime of your tax money on those who do.
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