President Trump loves a public spectacle. After 14 years on reality television, he has brought one show after another to his presidency — a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, the biggest fireworks display ever, even a cage match on the White House’s South Lawn.
Now his administration is planning another unprecedented public exhibition, but one with a macabre twist: livestreaming a firing squad execution.
For the first time, Americans would be invited to watch on their cellphones, laptops and other screens as a convicted murderer is put to death. Never before has an official execution been broadcast live in the United States, turning what in theory is supposed to be the solemn application of justice into an event for an audience of potentially millions.
Under the plan announced this week, those who click online on Dec. 3 would see Nidal Malik Hasan, who gunned down 13 fellow Army soldiers and injured 32 others at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, shot by rifle-bearing soldiers at the same base on the same day of the week at the same time of day that he opened fire. No limits on who would be allowed to watch were described, even though an Army manual restricts witnesses to an execution.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an interview with a conservative news outlet.
The idea seemed to shock even some of his colleagues in the administration. Vice President JD Vance cast doubt that it would be livestreamed, telling reporters that “I don’t know that that’s going to happen” and adding that he would not watch if it does. But Mr. Trump said he signed off on it. “Did I approve?” he said. “Absolutely I did.”
The idea of public executions hearkens back to the days when criminals were put to death in front of large crowds in person. And it fits into a broader sense advanced by Mr. Hegseth that the military was better in the days before politically correct “wokeness,” back when women were not allowed in combat, diversity was not a priority, soldiers were not accused of war crimes for aggressive action and his agency was called the Department of War.
No public execution has been conducted in the United States in 90 years, and the decision to conduct this one in front of an audience would put the country in the company of Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea and Somalia. Just 17 executions around the world were confirmed to be conducted publicly last year, according to Amnesty International: six in Afghanistan and 11 in Iran. Even Saudi Arabia, once known for hanging prisoners in public, has not conducted a public execution since 2022.
Even some supporters of capital punishment flinched at the idea of livestreaming Mr. Hasan’s execution, calling it medieval and barbaric. “Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”
At least a half dozen other Republican members of Congress made similar statements.
The plan horrified many senior military officers as well. Adm. James G. Stavridis, a retired Navy officer and former NATO supreme commander, agreed that Mr. Hasan deserved the death penalty, but said doing so in public was the kind of thing that “terrible regimes” do, not the United States. “It is not who we are as a military or a nation,” he said.
The Hasan execution order comes at a complicated time for the death penalty in the United States. Tennessee has paused executions after a botched effort to kill Christa Pike, a convicted murderer who survived two doses of a lethal drug. And Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, has indicated that he is seriously considering sparing the lives of all 563 prisoners on death row in California before leaving office in the coming months.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. similarly reprieved nearly every prisoner on federal death row weeks before stepping down, commuting the sentences of 37 convicted murderers to life in prison. He left just three men convicted of particularly notorious crimes on death row. Mr. Trump, when he took over, ordered the 37 men to be housed in the toughest federal prison conditions, prompting a legal fight.
No one was expressing sympathy this week for Mr. Hasan, 56, an Army psychiatrist who had been assigned to deploy to Afghanistan but decided he was on the wrong side of a war on Islam. On Nov. 5, 2009, he opened fire with a personal handgun at a processing center for deploying troops, shouting “Allahu akbar,” Arabic for “God is great.”
The victims included 10 men and three women ranging in age from 19 to 62. It was the deadliest mass shooting at a U.S. military base in history, and caused a searing debate about the presence of Muslim troops in the armed forces at a time when the United States was at war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Mr. Hasan, who was shot during the attack and paralyzed from the waist down, was convicted in 2013 of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder. His would be the first military execution since 1961.
But counterterrorism specialists called it self-defeating to show Mr. Hasan’s execution live, arguing that it could play into the hands of jihadist groups that celebrate the martyrdom of those who kill infidels.
Colin P. Clarke, a terrorism expert who is the executive director of the Soufan Center, an intelligence and consulting firm in New York, said that the administration’s plan was “incredibly myopic.”
“The video of a wheelchair-bound Hasan executed by firing squad will serve as ready-made propaganda for jihadist groups like Al Qaeda and Islamic State,” he said. “I don’t understand how this benefits the United States.”
The SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks jihadist propaganda and messaging, found posts indicating that extremists were already using the pending execution to encourage other radicals. “The crusaders wish to execute the brother publicly,” one message read. “Have they not learned anything from the pages of history?”
The Pentagon has not offered many details about how the execution would be carried out or how it would square with Army rules. The Army manual for military executions proscribes who can witness an execution, including the base commander, a chaplain, two members of the news media, the condemned prisoner’s family and one victim or representative of a victim’s family.
“No person under the age of 18 shall witness the execution,” the manual says.
Public executions were somewhat common in the early days of the United States. George Washington had soldiers he deemed traitors hanged in front of other troops, and revolutionaries hanged two accused loyalists in the Philadelphia Commons in November 1778. Northern states mostly abolished public hanging in the mid-1800s “out of a sense that it was an undignified spectacle,” said Stuart Banner, a historian of the death penalty.
Hangings were moved into prison yards and accessible mainly to public officials, journalists and the well-connected. As the electric chair and gas chamber replaced the gallows in the late 19th century and early 20th century, executions were moved indoors, and were therefore witnessed by fewer people.
“This would be the first public execution in the U.S. in nearly a century, and it would probably be seen by more people than any execution in American history,” said Mr. Banner, the author of “The Death Penalty: An American History” and a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “There are photographs of public hangings from the old days, but no one filmed them.”
The last legally sanctioned public execution in the United States was conducted in Owensboro, Ky., in 1936 when Rainey Bethea, a 22-year-old Black man, was convicted of raping a 70-year-old white woman and hanged in front of a crowd of as many as 20,000 spectators. Another hanging a year later in Missouri was in theory moved into a yard, but thousands still managed to watch.
Sonya Lea, the author of “American Bloodlines,” a book about the Bethea case that was published last year, said that it was widely denounced as “a brutal carnival of sadism” and led states to stop allowing large crowds to witness executions.
“There’s a kind of parallel in what we’re looking at now,” she said, “in terms of America’s barbarism and depravity that’s happening — not just a killing by firing squad but cultivating that kind of cruelty as a modern entertainment.”
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
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