Killer who ambushed off-duty cop to face firing squad in second execution of its kind

A who ambushed and shot an off duty police officer eight times before burning his body in a killing spree is set to become the

South Carolina's highest has rejected the last major appeal from Mikal Mahdi, 41, who is to be put to death with three bullets to the heart at 6pm on April 11 at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. Mahdi's lawyers said his original lawyers put on a shallow case trying to spare his life that didn't call on relatives, teachers or people who knew him and ignored the impact of weeks spent in as a teen.

But the state in a unanimous decision, ruled that many of those arguments were made in earlier unsuccessful appeals and refused to stop Friday's scheduled execution so further hearings could be held. Mahdi, who admitted killing an off-duty police officer in an ambush at the officer's shed in Calhoun County, is the fifth person set to be executed in the state in just eight months.

All made final appeals to the state Supreme Court but all were rejected. Mahdi has , by asking Republican Governor Henry McMaster to reduce his sentence to life in prison without parole just minutes before his scheduled execution time.

But no South Carolina governor has offered clemency in the 47 executions carried out in the state since the death penalty resumed in the US in 1976. Mahdi, 41, was convicted of killing Orangeburg Public Safety officer James Myers in 2004, shooting him at least eight times, then burning his body.

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Myers' wife found him in the shed, which had been the backdrop to their wedding 15 months earlier. Myers' shed was a short distance through the woods from a gas station where Mahdi tried but failed to buy gas with a stolen credit card and left behind a vehicle he had carjacked in Columbia.

Mahdi was arrested afterward in Florida while driving Myers' unmarked police pickup truck. He also admitted to the killing three days earlier of Christopher Biggs, a North Carolina convenience store worker who was shot twice in the head as he checked Mahdi's ID.

Mahdi was sentenced to life in prison for that killing. Mahdi pleaded guilty to killing Myers, leaving a judge under South Carolina law to decide if he would be sentenced to death or life without parole.

Prosecutors called 28 witnesses for Circuit Court Judge Clifton Newman to hear. The defense called two, according to Mahdi's appeal. The defense's case to spare Mahdi's life lasted only about 30 minutes. It "didn't even span the length of a Law & Order episode, and was just as superficial," Mahdi's lawyers wrote.

Prosecutors said 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 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.

As a prisoner, Mahdi has been caught three times with tools he could have used to escape, including a piece of sharpened metal thatcould be used as a knife, according to prison records. While he was on death row, he stabbed a guard and hit another worker with a concrete block, the records show. "The nature of the man is violence," prosecutors wrote.

Mahdi is to be the second inmate executed by South Carolina's new firing squad after Brad Sigmon chose to die that way last month. The firing squad is an execution method with a long and violent history in the U.S. and around the . .

Before Sigmon's execution last month, only three other prisoners in the U.S. had been executed by firing squad in the past 50 years. All were in Utah, most recently Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010.

Three prison employees who volunteer for the role will fire high-powered rifles at Mahdi from 15 feet (about 4.5 meters) away, aiming for a target on his heart. Mahdi also could have chosen the electric chair or lethal injection.