South Carolina State lost out on the MEAC’s automatic NCAA tournament bid in heartbreaking fashion on Saturday when Caleb McCarty committed a reach-in foul on Norfolk State’s Christian Ings with eight seconds remaining in regulation.

McCarty had just tied the game at 65-65 on a layup, catching a ricochet after Jayden Johnson tipped the ball for a steal.

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Apparently forgetting or not realizing that it was a tied ballgame, McCarty then reached in to foul Ings as he advanced the ball up court, as if South Carolina State had to send Norfolk State to the foul line to stop the clock and hopefully get the ball back for a chance to tie or win.

However, since the score was tied, Ings got two free throws and made one of two for a 66-65 lead. Drayton Jones got the rebound on Ings’ miss, setting up Johnson for a last shot, but he missed at the buzzer. As a result, the Spartans won the MEAC’s automatic bid with the 66-65 win.

Ings led Norfolk St. with 17 points, seven rebounds and four assists. Brian Moore Jr. followed by 16 points and also grabbed seven boards with two steals. The Spartans finish 24-10 and 11-3 in the MEAC as they wait to see where and who they will play in the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2022.

For the Bulldogs, who led 34-25 at halftime, Wilson Dubinsky scored a game-high 24 points, knocking down all five of his 3-point attempts. Omar Croskey was the only other South Carolina State player in double figures, tallying 10 points.

South Carolina State finished with a 20-13 mark, 11-3 in the MEAC. Its 22-year NCAA tournament drought continues.

South Carolina has scheduled the execution of an inmate convicted of fatally shooting an off-duty police officer, which would make him the fifth person the state put to death since it resumed executions in the fall following an involuntary 13-year pause.

Mikal Mahdi, 41, is set to be executed on April 11 at 6 p.m. at a prison in Columbia, the state Supreme Court announced Friday.

Mahdi can choose to die by lethal injection, the electric chair or a firing squad. He must make a decision by March 28, or he will be killed by the electric chair.

On March 7, Brad Sigmon became the first prisoner executed by firing squad in the U.S. in 15 years when he was killed in South Carolina. Only three other inmates in the U.S. have been executed by this method since 1976, and all were in Utah.

CONVICTED DOUBLE MURDERER EXECUTED BY FIRING SQUAD IN SOUTH CAROLINA

Three other prisoners have been put to death in South Carolina since the state resumed executions in September. Freddie Owens on Sept. 20, Richard Moore on Nov. 1 and Marion Bowman Jr. on Jan. 31 all died by lethal injection. Sigmon chose the firing squad due to concerns about the prolonged suffering the three other inmates had faced when they were killed by lethal injection.

The court postponed a potential sixth execution for Steven Bixby, who was convicted in the killing of two police officers in an Abbeville County land dispute in December 2003. Bixby was set to be put to death in May, but the court ruled that a judge must first determine if he is mentally competent.

A psychologist said Bixby understands what led to his death sentence, but that he also believes blood found on his clothes the night of the killings contains the DNA of Jesus Christ.

Mahdi’s attorney, David Weiss, said his client had a long history of troubled behavior starting as a child.

As early as the second grade, Mahdi suffered from mental despair and discussed self-harm, Weiss said. He already had a criminal record by the time he was a teenager, spending weeks in solitary confinement after being convicted of breaking and entering and attacking a police officer in Virginia.

“He was repeatedly failed by his own family and the justice system, who neglected to see him for who he was: a wounded child in need of support,” Weiss said in a statement. “Mikal’s story is one of trauma, neglect, and the many missed opportunities for providing him the safety and compassion that every child should have.”

Mahdi stole a gun and a car in Virginia on July 14, 2004, when he was 21, arrest records show. The next day, he shot and killed a North Carolina store clerk as the clerk was checking his identification. A couple of days later, he carjacked someone at an intersection in Columbia, South Carolina.

On July 18, 2004, while on the run after those crimes, Mahdi hid in Orangeburg, South Carolina, public safety officer James Myers’ shed. Mahdi ambushed Meyers when the officer returned from a birthday celebration for his wife, sister and daughter, prosecutors said.

The potential sixth execution for Steven Bixby, who was convicted in the killing of two police officers in 2003, has been postponed. (South Carolina Department of Corrections via AP)

Myers, 56, was shot eight or nine times, including twice in the head after falling to the ground. A pathologist testified that at least seven of the shots would have been fatal.

Mahdi then set Myers’ body on fire and ran away. Myers’ wife discovered her husband’s dead body in the shed, which they had used for the backdrop of their wedding.

On July 21, 2004, Mahdi was taken into custody in Florida. When one of the officers involved in his arrest learned what he was wanted for in South Carolina, he thanked Mahdi for not shooting at him. Mahdi told him that the only reason he did not was because he was skeptical that he could successfully shoot two officers and their K-9 and get away with it.

While behind bars, Mahdi was caught three times with tools he could have used to escape. One was an Allen wrench and the others were homemade handcuff keys, including one that was found under his tongue at his trial.

On death row, Mahdi stabbed a guard and struck another worker with a concrete block. On three occasions, prison staff found sharpened metal in his cell that could be used as a knife.

During his trial, Mahdi’s lawyers said their client was the second son of a woman who was wedded in an arranged marriage at 16-years-old. His family described a chaotic childhood, although nobody testified about abuse or mental illness.

Mahdi pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced by Judge Clifton Newman, who at the time told The Post and Courier that he was not sure he believed in the death penalty, but the case became bigger than his beliefs.

SOUTH CAROLINA SCHEDULING EXECUTIONS AGAIN AFTER A PAUSE FOR THE HOLIDAYS

This photo provided by the South Carolina Department of Corrections shows the state’s death chamber in Columbia, South Carolina, including the electric chair, right, and a firing squad chair, left. (South Carolina Department of Corrections via AP)

“My challenge and my commitment throughout my judicial career has been to temper justice with mercy and to seek to find the humanity in every defendant that I sentence,” Newman said as he handed down Mahdi’s punishment. “That sense of humanity seems not to exist in Mikal Deen Mahdi”

Once one of the busiest for executions, South Carolina resumed executions in September after a 13-year pause caused in part by the state having difficulty obtaining lethal injection drugs due to pharmaceutical companies’ concerns that they would have to disclose they had sold the drugs to state officials.

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The state legislature then passed a shield law allowing officials to keep lethal injection drug suppliers private. The legislature also approved the firing squad as another execution method over difficulties obtaining the drugs.

South Carolina has executed 47 inmates since the death penalty was resumed in the U.S. in 1976. In the early 2000s, the state was carrying out an average of three executions per year. Only nine states have killed more inmates.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

[Episcopal News Service] As part of its ongoing commitment to racial reconciliation and education work, 46 people from the Charleston-based Diocese of South Carolina last week embarked on a racial justice pilgrimage to civil rights landmarks, museums and memorials in Atlanta, Georgia, and Montgomery and Selma, Alabama.

Downtown Charleston’s three historically Black parishes – Calvary Episcopal Church, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and St. Stephen’s Church, known collectively as the Three Churches United – led the March 6-10 diocesan pilgrimage, which commemorated the 60th anniversary of the three 54-mile Selma to Montgomery marches organized by civil rights activists to demand that voting rights be granted to Black Americans.

“These activists knew in the recesses of their hearts and their souls that what they were doing was right, and the way that they were being treated was wrong, especially with the right to vote,” the Rev. Ricardo Bailey, Calvary’s rector, told Episcopal News Service. “The powers that be at the time knew that if voting were accessible to Black folk, then the whole mindset of Jim Crow and racism and segregation were imminently going to be threatened.”

The first march, which took place on March 7, 1965, is known today as “Bloody Sunday” because Alabama state troopers assaulted more than 600 nonviolent civil rights marchers, led by John Lewis, as they were crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Two days later, Martin Luther King Jr. led 2,500 marchers over the bridge and said a brief prayer before turning everyone around because of a court order preventing them from making the full march. Later that night, three white Unitarian Universalist ministers who were in town for the march were attacked by Ku Klux Klan members, killing the Rev. James Reeb. On March 21, nearly 8,000 people gathered at the historic Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma to march to Montgomery after U.S. district judge Frank Minis Johnson ruled in favor of their right to protest. The final march concluded on March 25 with 25,000 people gathering on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol, where King delivered his “How Long, Not Long” speech. The marches led to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“What many people fail to realize is that the crux of the Civil Rights Movement – with the loss of lives, the marches, the violence, all of it – really existed around the whole aspect of the right to vote,” Bailey said. “When you’re able to vote, you’re able to vote for people who you entrust with governance over you … You are able to vote people into office who can help to enact, as well as legislate, just laws.”

The Rev. Laura Rezac, executive director of Camp St. Christopher in Seabrook Island, with support from the Three Churches United and South Carolina Bishop Ruth Woodliff-Stanley, organized the diocesan pilgrimage, which began in Atlanta at the Absalom Jones Center for Racial Healing and the Martin Luther King Jr. Center of Nonviolent Social Change. From there, the pilgrims – most of whom were parishioners of the Three Churches United – drove together to Montgomery to visit the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally known as the National Lynching Memorial, and the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.

“The itinerary and the daily devotions selected for prayer and reflection while on the pilgrimage – everything was chosen with purpose and intention,” Rezac told ENS. “How people choose to act on the experiences they had moving forward in the weeks and months to come will indicate the program’s success. I believe that this group of people will listen to how the Holy Spirit is telling them to use that work in our context here in Charleston.”

On March 9, before joining thousands of other people who were also in town to commemorate the Selma to Montgomery marches and Bloody Sunday, the South Carolina pilgrims gathered at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church to listen to Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer and founder and executive director of the Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative, preach. The Equal Justice Initiative provides legal representation to incarcerated people who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes, low-income people and people who may have been denied a fair trial. It also founded the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.

“He reminded us that it’s kind of become a theme that grace and mercy seem to have been put on trial recently by many of our politicians and judges, and we the church need to do more to follow our scriptural mandate and act justly in love and mercy and walk humbly with God,” the Rev. Michael Shaffer, interim rector of St. Mark’s, told ENS. “Hearing that before going outside to walk across the [Edmund Pettus] Bridge, I felt like we were living into our calling as disciples of Christ.”

Michigan Bishop Bonnie Perry, left, South Carolina Bishop Ruth Woodliff-Stanley, center, an a lay leader in the Diocese of Michigan, right, visited historic sites in Alabama as part of their respective diocesan civil rights pilgrimages commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches that led to the adoption of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting. They joined thousands of other people to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, where the marches started. March 9, 2025. Photo: Courtesy of Ruth Woodliff-Stanley

While marching across the 1,248-foot bridge, the South Carolina pilgrims unexpectedly ran into the 56 pilgrims from the Detroit-based Diocese of Michigan. Bishop Bonnie Perry was part of the group.

Woodliff-Stanley, a descendant of slaveholders who lived in Charleston, told ENS that she thought about the courage of people who didn’t let Bloody Sunday stop them from committing their fight for Black Americans’ right to vote. She also said that the interactive Legacy Museum left a large impression on her, making her reflect on U.S. history.

“This country sits on top the displacement of Indigenous people, and on top of that is the transatlantic slave trade and the domestic slave trade, and all the wealth and prosperity that was made started with the watery graves of the enslaved Africans [during the Middle Passage],” Woodliff-Stanley said. “Now, there’s an attempt to erase our story of race in America from school curricula … it makes really clear the work before us now, in both reading and seeing these historic sites in person.”

Throughout the pilgrimage, the group – which included a mix of Black and white pilgrims, including two teenagers – engaged in prayer, reflection and discussion. The Rev. Adam Shoemaker, rector of St. Stephen’s, told ENS that the timing is “very poignant” considering President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion.

“I believe this group, collectively, is in agreement that there’s a lot going on in the world right now, and to be in Selma to mark this anniversary at this particular time … reminded us that we need to keep pushing forward,” he said.

Established in 1663, South Carolina was the first British North American colony founded as a “slave society.” Charleston was the largest slave trading and auction city in the United States with as many as 260,000 West Africans sent there between 1670 and 1808. Most – about 40% – disembarked in Gadsden’s Wharf, the largest single point of entry for enslaved Africans, which is now the site of the International African American Museum. By the 18th century, the city had the highest number of enslaved people in the country. The Three Churches United are located within two miles of the museum.

In 2020, the Diocese of South Carolina recommitted to its racial reconciliation work when it formed the Diocesan Racial Justice and Reconciliation Commission to increase the awareness of racial history and to promote and enable racial justice and reconciliation throughout the diocese and in wider communities. Part of those racial reconciliation efforts includes maintaining and sustaining the diocese’s historically Black churches and working to hire additional Black clergy.

The commission, which consists of clergy and laity, regularly hosts educational events throughout the diocese, including at Voorhees University in Denmark, one of two historically Black colleges with Episcopal roots. The commission also facilitates the diocese’s Sacred Ground circles. Sacred Ground is the church’s antiracism curriculum that was initially developed as a resource to learn about the history of racism in the United States and how that racism continues to manifest itself today in American social interactions and institutions, including the church.

The commission additionally hosts learning days to teach the history of the Diocese of South Carolina, including its complicity in slavery. The next learning day, taking place on March 29 at the Church of the Epiphany in Summerville, will highlight the history of the church and its benefactor, Catherine B. “Kitty” Smith Springs, a prominent businesswoman of color.

Even though the pilgrimage highlighted traumatic points in U.S. history, Bailey said there also was “a lot of joy” for him at times.

“Seeing some of our Black elders and how much it meant for them to be there with this group, I was really moved to tears more than once on this pilgrimage,” he said. “To witness history through their eyes … we’ve got to be courageous and continue working together.”

-Shireen Korkzan is a reporter and assistant editor for Episcopal News Service. She can be reached at skorkzan@episcopalchurch.org.