South Carolina executes Mikal Mahdi by firing squad

A firing squad on Friday executed a South Carolina man who killed an off-duty police officer, the second time the rare execution method has been used by the state in the past five weeks.

Mikal Mahdi was put to death on Friday after pleading guilty to murder in 2004. 

Mikal Mahdi cried out as the shots hit him, and his arms flexed. He groaned two more times about 45 seconds after that. His breaths continued for about 80 seconds before he appear led to take one final gasp.

A doctor checked him for a little over a minute before declaring him dead.

RELATED: Brad Sigmon: Death row inmate executed by firing squad, 1st in US in 15 years

Mikal Mahdi is set to be executed on Friday, April 11. (Photo courtesy of the South Carolina Department of Corrections) 

FOX News obtained a statement from David Weiss, one of Mahdi’s lawyers, and it read "Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi has chosen the lesser of three evils. "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."

Mikal Mahdi’s crime

The backstory:

Mahdi, 42, chose to die by three bullets to the heart instead of lethal injection or the electric chair. 

Mahdi was convicted of the 2004 death of Orangeburg Public Safety officer James Myers. The Associated Press reported that police said Mahdi killed a store clerk in North Carolina and stole a car at gunpoint in Columbia, South Carolina when he hid in Myers' shed at his Calhoun County farm after he couldn't buy gas for the stolen car.

Myers was shot multiple times, and his wife found his burned body in the shed. Police arrested Mahdi in Myers' unmarked police truck in Florida.

The AP reported that Mahdi also pleaded guilty to shooting Winston-Salem, North Carolina, convenience store clerk Christopher Boggs three days before Myers was killed. Mahdi was sentenced to life in prison for Boggs' death.

Who was South Carolina’s first prisoner executed by firing squad?

Dig deeper:

The firing squad is an execution method with a long and violent history around the world. It 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.

Mahdi is 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 executions in the state.

 Brad Sigmon chose to be shot to death in South Carolina on March 7 and was the first prisoner executed by firing squad in the U.S. in 15 years. Sigmon died less than three minutes after three bullets hit him, FOX News reported.