A firing squad in South Carolina is set to execute a death row inmate who ambushed an off-duty police officer, shot him nine times and set him on fire.
Under the state's execution protocols, the firing squad will put a hood over 42-year-old Mikal Mahdi's head and shoot him in the heart simultaneously with three bullets on Friday.
It will be the second such execution in the state this year but only the fifth in the U.S. since 1977. South Carolina carried out the firing squad execution execution of Brad Keith Sigmon last month in what was the first execution to use the method in the country in 15 years.
Mahdi was convicted of the 2004 killing of 56-year-old Capt. James Myers, an off-duty Orangeburg Public Safety officer who was killed at the same spot on his farm property where he and his wife got married. She was the one to find his body.
"His heart and mind are full of hate and malice," prosecutor David Pascoe told jurors during Mahdi's trial, according to an archived story in The Times and Democrat. "(He's) the epitome of evil."