Eddie Slovik's casualty file from WW2 was about 6 or 7 inches thick when I got a look at it several years ago. At the time, I was working as an Image Specialist/Contractor for the DOD. Our job was to aid in digitally recording casualty files from that war, as well as the one in Korea. The goal was to assist the DPAA  (Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency) in identifying some 73,000 unknowns lost in those conflicts. They manage to ID maybe 200 vets a year, and it means everything to the family members left behind. Anyway, most files were anywhere from a couple of pages to maybe 15 or 20. George Patton got a banker's box to himself, however.

When a co-worker pulled Slovik's file out of the box, he was shocked because it was unusually thick.

"Wow! Who the hell is this guy and what did he do?" one of my co-workers asked.

I'm a history guy, so I was able to fill him in a little. I've also roamed the earth for a long time and remembered the 1974 TV movie The Execution of Private Eddie Slovik, which I recall seeing in junior high.

Basically, Eddie Slovik was the only soldier executed for desertion in WW2. About 27,000 guys were charged with desertion, but he was the only one who faced a firing squad following conviction. Obviously, he was executed as an example to others. Okay, so I was recalling this because last week, a South Carolina execution squad kind of had problems killing death row inmate Mikal Mahdi instantaneously. He didn't go right away.

READ MORE: 'Botched' South Carolina Execution Draws Scrutiny

Mikal Mahdi was convicted in 2006 of murdering police officer James Myers by shooting him eight times and setting his body on fire in 2004. When his appeals finally ran out, he got an execution date 20 years later. And he requested the firing squad. The state obliged, and last week his sentence was carried out. It wasn't exactly "clean," and I suspect that such things rarely are.

Three riflemen were selected and all fired live ammunition. This bucked conventional tradition with American firing squads, as they generally have one of the shooters fire a blank cartridge (nobody knows who actually has it). The thought process here is to create doubt among the team to avoid internal conflict. Maybe I had the blank cartridge, and so it might have been the other guys who actually killed him. Not me. I shoot military rifles from the First and Second World Wars, and I'm told by other guys that you can tell from recoil whether or not you'd be the one with the blank. I have no firsthand experience, so I can't say if this is accurate or not. But it would seem to make sense. Anyway...

So Mahdi meets his three-man rifle team, who stand 15 yards away. Upon command, they fire, and so begins the newest controversy about capital punishment. His former lawyers have filed a complaint with the state Supreme Court because they attest that their client screamed and took a minute to die (other accounts say a minute and a half) and that he actually suffered pain in the process. Moreover, the autopsy, required by South Carolina law, claimed that all three bullets struck, the heart was impacted, there were no exit wounds, and two rounds went down the same hole because only two holes were noted. Since they were using ammunition that fragments, actual whole bullets were not found. The lawyers dispute this and say their client was struck in the liver and pancreas below the heart.

This one is full of problems, and I expect we will learn more about this in the future. Mahdi's lawyers will put their teeth into it, and as it happens every so often, the basic premise of the states' right to capital punishment will be challenged. No cruel and unusual punishment. Mahdi's legal team says that since the state "messed up" the execution, and Mahdi suffered pain for 80 seconds, it constituted cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.

But cruel and unusual punishment is such a vague term that it almost means nothing. Sure, using methods from medieval times would certainly qualify, like the rack, the iron maiden, or the wheel, but today we have become much more enlightened. The electric chair was invented by a dentist who tried to come up with a way that would be quick and kind of painless, but that hasn't worked out quite so well. The gas chamber? I don't know what they were thinking with that one, but now we have lethal injection. That one has its critics, too, because there have been a number of cases where it didn't go smoothly. 

I guess you could give someone an overdose of fentanyl, and that would work as it has for so many unfortunates who inadvertently killed themselves that way, but many who oppose don't believe a convicted killer should exit this world in a euphoric cloud of purple haze.

Then, finally, we consider the firing squad. Mahdi apparently suffered for an inordinate amount of time, according to his lawyers, and so this method, in their view, would be unconstitutional. I suppose one could increase the chances of administering death more quickly by increasing the number of marksmen, but in the case of Slovik's firing squad, they used 12 riflemen, and he still didn't die right away. Shot 11 times according to the coroner's report, he hung on to life for a bit. You can read about it in links previously cited, but even though the documents our team scanned were still classified, I can verify that this information is generally accurate. (I don't know how Wikipedia came by this information, but who knows? They made a movie out of this story 50 years ago, so I guess it's out there somewhere else.)

The point in writing about this is to consider a question that popped into my head: Why would Mahdi or his lawyers have a reasonable expectation that facing down three live gun barrels was going to have a guarantee of the quick and painless? A gun might jam. A nervous shooter could miss the heart. Stuff happens. I'm not sure you could ever guarantee something like that unless explosives were involved, which, of course, is out of the question. In 1905, one doctor carried out a basic experiment regarding the guillotine because he thought that the victim might actually retain consciousness for a few moments after the blade dropped. With happenstance being a normal part of most equations, there's probably no way to guarantee that an inmate would have a seamless, painless, and instantaneous passage from one life into the next. According to the attorneys, their expectation was based on what the prison officials told them. I'm not privy to those conversations, and I'm not a lawyer, but if I can know a little bit about firing squads just from reading some rudimentary history, you'd think scholarly barristers would have advised their client that "Hey, you can ask for the firing squad if you want to, but it might not be the quick exit that you're looking for."

If Mahdi's attorneys file a lawsuit rather than just a complaint against the state of South Carolina, hoping to parlay this into a ban on capital punishment, I don't think it would succeed because it has been upheld by SCOTUS for so long. But if anything should come out of it, like the mandatory Miranda rights, I could see where the government might require a disclaimer for firing squads, informing the condemned that the sentence will surely be carried out, but you can have no reasonable expectation of leaving the planet instantly or painlessly.

It is a firing squad, after all.