A prison firing squad in South Carolina executed Mikal Mahdi on Friday, the second recent death row killing in the state by authorized gunfire.

Mahdi, 42, was shot dead by corrections employees inside the execution chamber, where authorities have carried out a rapid spree of killings as South Carolina aggressively revives capital punishment.

Mahdi was sentenced to death for the 2004 killing of James Myers, a 56-year-old off-duty public safety officer. His attorneys fought in recent days to block the execution, arguing he had suffered significant abuse and torture in his childhood and was denied a fair trial, but the state courts and US supreme court rejected the final petitions.

South Carolina’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, announced minutes before Mahdi’s execution that he would not be commuting Mahdi’s sentence. No governor in the state has granted clemency to a death row defendant in the last 50 years of the modern death penalty era.

The state resumed executions last year after a 13-year pause caused by its inability to procure lethal injection supplies. Officials now direct people on death row to choose their method of killing – either electric chair, lethal injection and firing squad. Mahdi’s lawyers said he selected the “lesser of three evils” and opted to be shot instead of “burned and mutilated in the electric chair, or suffering a lingering death on the lethal injection gurney”.

The state’s firing squad protocols called for Mahdi to be strapped to a chair and shot by three prison employees aiming at a bullseye placed on the chest. Mahdi gave no final statement and did not look toward the witnesses in the room, which included his lawyer.