The article stated that there were three shooters, and only two gunshot wounds. I seem to recall from the early '70s that firing squads of five people or so always secretly loaded one weapon with blanks. That way the shooters could all convince themselves that they were the one who had the blank if their conscience bothered them. Maybe these guys did the same thing but with only three shooters…
I think if you can’t find someone with the fortitude to put a hole in the victim’s brain stem at muzzle contact range (let’s ask the people who pushed for this punishment, for example), and you have to go through all this procedure to alleviate “guilty consciences”, maybe the whole idea isn’t so great?
As for why Mahdi’s body showed two wounds from the execution rather than three, a doctor noted in the comments section on the autopsy commissioned by the state that “it is believed that” two bullets went through one wound. Whereas in Utah, not all members of the state’s firing squad shoot live bullets, in South Carolina, the rifles of all three shooters were supposed to be loaded with ammunition.
The two wounds on Mahdi’s body were described in the autopsy as being almost exactly the same size. Pathologists who reviewed the report expressed doubt that two bullets went through precisely the same, small hole.
“I think the odds of that are pretty minuscule,” Wigren said
The article stated that there were three shooters, and only two gunshot wounds. I seem to recall from the early '70s that firing squads of five people or so always secretly loaded one weapon with blanks. That way the shooters could all convince themselves that they were the one who had the blank if their conscience bothered them. Maybe these guys did the same thing but with only three shooters…
I think if you can’t find someone with the fortitude to put a hole in the victim’s brain stem at muzzle contact range (let’s ask the people who pushed for this punishment, for example), and you have to go through all this procedure to alleviate “guilty consciences”, maybe the whole idea isn’t so great?
While I agree with the conclusion, making a moral judgment based on a random persons guilty conscience isn’t very reliable.
We should switch to execution by strangling to death by hand. The judge has to conduct the execution.
Which is dumb because you can clearly tell whether you had the blank or not from the amount of recoil.
That is the protocol in Utah for firing squads, but not South Carolina
(Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250509155025/https://www.npr.org/2025/05/08/nx-s1-5389846/firing-squad-south-carolina-death-penalty-execution)
Maybe their firing squad line up behind one another?