The recent revival of old-school execution methods is one of the most distressing signs that the United States is moving backward. While other countries eliminate the death penalty, in the U.S., we have leaders champing at the bit to kill death row prisoners. In response to arguments that lethal injection methods have inflicted lingering and excruciating pain on the executed, those leaders have turned back the clock to methods they can pretend as relatively painless. But it’s all a farce.
To be clear, there is no acceptable way to execute a living, breathing human being.
To be clear, there is no acceptable way to execute a living, breathing human being. There’s no morally justifiable reason to do it. And there’s no reason to believe that executions make anybody safer. But news out of South Carolina should cause us to focus on the way that state governments continue to insist that they can find a good way to kill people.
That state told convicted murderer Mikal Mahdi he could have his pick: death by lethal injection, firing squad or electrocution. “Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi has chosen the lesser of three evils,” one of his attorneys said March 28. “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.”
But it doesn’t appear that Mahdi got the near instantaneous death that he and the state wanted, the near-instantaneous death that a firing squad is supposed to guarantee. On April 11, a three-person firing squad fired at the target placed over Mahdi’s heart, but in court filings to the South Carolina Supreme Court on Thursday, Mahdi’s attorneys pointed out that there were only two wounds on the cadaver’s body, and they say neither of the executioners hit his heart directly.
“He’s not going to die instantaneously from this,” Dr. Carl Wigren, a forensic pathologist who reviewed the defense team’s autopsy documents for NPR, said. “I think that it took him some time to bleed out.”
“The autopsy confirms what I saw and heard,” David Weiss, an attorney for Mahdi, who witnessed his execution, said in a statement. “Mikal suffered an excruciating death. We don’t know what went wrong, but nothing about his execution was humane. The implications are horrifying for anyone facing the same choice as Mikal. South Carolina’s refusal to acknowledge their failures with executions cannot continue.”
Each of the three people in the firing squad was supposed to have a live round. In the attempt to explain why an autopsy that South Carolina commissioned found only two wounds, a doctor added a comment that says “it is believed that” two of the bullets entered the same wound.
It is inconceivable that all the executioners missed directly hitting the condemned man’s heart but that two of them missed to the exact same degree. We should all feel insulted that a state government’s record suggests that’s what happened.
That South Carolina’s method of choice wasn’t as humane as advertised is less surprising when you consider that different courts can’t even agree on what constitutes a humane execution. The South Carolina Supreme Court ruled last year that a firing squad was an acceptable form of punishment because even if it did cause excruciating pain, “the pain will last only ten to fifteen seconds.” But when Jessie Hoffman, who was condemned to die in Louisiana, said that suffocating him by nitrogen gas would be torturous and unnecessarily cruel and that a firing squad would be better, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals answered bluntly, “That can’t be right.”
And so the state of Louisiana killed Hoffman with a method that it doesn’t allow for the euthanization of dogs and cats. The gas started flowing at 6:21 p.m. on March 18, Louisiana officials reported. John Simerman, a staff writer for The Times-Picayune | The Advocate who witnessed Hoffman’s execution, wrote that the 46-year-old’s “chest rose and he made a jerking motion” at 6:22, and that a minute later his “body shook and his fingers twitched” and he “appeared to pull at the arms of the table.” That was followed by his hands clenching. The South Carolina Supreme Court ruled last year that, at minimum, a person executed by a firing squad would die quicker. While the exact moment Hoffman expired can’t be known, the gas flowed for 19 minutes, and he was pronounced dead at 6:50 p.m. When the nitrogen mask that had been put over his face was removed, Simerman wrote, Hoffman’s “head was tilted back, teeth exposed in a grimace.” Again, the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled last year that, at minimum, a person executed by a firing squad would die quicker “… unless there is a massive botch of the execution in which each member of the firing squad simply misses the inmate’s heart.” It appears that in the case of Mikal Mahdi, each member of the firing squad did just that. Mahdi’s execution was barbaric. Some people may grudgingly concede that point because his killing was botched. But they ought to admit that it was barbaric because it was an execution.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune. 
