According to the inmate’s lawyers, a man in South Carolina, executed by firing squad last month, endured “excruciating conscious pain and suffering” for up to a minute before his death because of a “massive botch” by the shooters, who “largely missed his heart.”

“The implications of this botch are horrifying,” state Mikal Madhi’s legal team in a status report and “Notice of Botched Execution” filed with the South Carolina Supreme Court. The filing names the respondent as the state’s former Department of Corrections (SCDC) director, Bryan Stirling, who stepped down from his role at the end of April.

The document cites a third-party autopsy report commissioned by the SCDC that shows several alleged mistakes committed by the department shooters during Mahdi’s April 11 execution, including their low placement of shots, according to Mahdi’s attorneys. The shooters fired two shots instead of three, as required, and their actions ultimately led to the “suffering” that Madhi experienced, his lawyers claim.

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One of the pathologists from the autopsy, Dr. Jonathan Arden, reported that Madhi appeared to have two half-inch wounds that were “just above the border with the abdomen, which is not an area largely overlying the heart,” according to the Supreme Court notice.

“The autopsy also documents two distinct wound paths that traveled ‘downward and to the right’ inside Mr. Mahdi’s torso, ‘macerat[ing] the left lobe of the liver and the pancreas’ and ‘the left lower lung lobe’ before crashing into his spine and ribs,” the document says, quoting Arden’s report.

“Along the way, bullet fragments made ‘two perforations of the right ventricle of [Mr. Mahdi’s] heart, comprising two holes in the front, and two holes in the back,’ leaving it otherwise intact,” the notice adds.