In confirming his plans to livestream Ft. Hood mass shooter Nidal Malik Hasan’s military execution by firing squad on Dec. 3, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it a “no brainer” punishment for a “radical Islamist terror attack” on U.S. service members.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand [that] there are serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said in an interview with Real America’s Voice network.
Others across the country and around the world — Democrats and Republicans, human rights experts, legal scholars and military and religious leaders — condemned it as a barbaric throwback to an era when executions were cast as entertainment, and as the world’s leading democracy adopting a form of punishment carried out in modern times only by authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations.
“Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) wrote on X. “Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.”
“I absolutely support the sentence of death, but live-streaming executions is what jihadists do. America is better than that,” Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) wrote.
The United Nations’ High Commissioner for Human Rights said that “the livestreaming of an execution is tantamount to a public execution and would breach the absolute prohibition of torture.” The head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said it would “further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people.”
Matthew Robinson, a criminal justice professor at Appalachian State University and author of a book on U.S. capital punishment titled “Death Nation,” said he was “appalled” by the plans. “It strikes me as meant to be entertaining.” He said the last military execution was in 1961, and the last by firing squad was in 1945.
Hasan was an Army psychiatrist and major who in 2009 entered a medical building on the Texas military base with a laser-sighted handgun, shouted “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — and opened fire, killing 13 people and injuring 32 others. He has since spoken of being a “martyr” if executed.
President Trump, an outspoken proponent of the death penalty for years but also a past critic of public executions in places like Iran, has signed off on Hasan’s execution but not addressed Hegseth’s plans. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, said Friday that people should remember that Hasan “brutally murdered a lot of innocent people.” But he also said he would not watch a livestream of the execution, and expressed doubt that it is “actually going to happen.”
On his first day in office this term, Trump issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to restore the death penalty to prominence. In April, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it had taken steps to do so, including by “expanding the protocol” to include firing squads.
Five states allow execution by firing squad: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly turned down appeals contending such executions amount to “cruel and unusual punishment,” which is barred under U.S. law. South Carolina executed three men by firing squad last year.
When the Supreme Court last year rejected an Alabama inmate’s request to be killed by firing squad rather than with nitrogen hypoxia, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor — joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented, writing, “Boyd asks for the barest form of mercy: to die by firing squad, which would kill him in seconds, rather than by a torturous suffocation lasting up to four minutes. The Constitution would grant him that grace.”
Last week, Tennessee inmate Christa Pike survived what was meant to be a lethal injection of the barbiturate pentobarbital. Other states have also struggled with executions by lethal injection in recent years.
Much of the criticism of Hegseth’s plan for Hasan has centered not on the method of killing, but on the livestreaming of it.
Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said the center has “no record of any execution being livestreamed,” and is “not aware of any regulation or precedent for a military execution to be livestreamed on the internet or otherwise made widely available to the public.”
Fox News commentator Howard Kurtz wrote: “I’m sensing revulsion on the left and right, not so much for killing a death row prisoner — although firing squad seems extreme in the modern age — but for the Pentagon to live-stream it, turning this into a horrifying TV show to entertain the masses. Is this America?”
Daniel LaChance, an associate history professor at Emory University and author of the book “Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United States,” said the last public execution in the U.S. occurred in 1936, when a Black man convicted of rape was hanged in Kentucky — which still allowed public executions after most states had abandoned the practice.
That execution was “by all accounts a grotesque carnival” and “sort of like a gladiatorial contest brought to life in the 20th century, where the crowd was surly, shouting,” LaChance said. “It was a debacle.”
That the Trump administration is seeking to turn capital punishment into a public spectacle once more, LaChance said, is out of line with decades of thinking on the issue, but in line with Trump’s own ethos about crime and punishment.
“His whole brand is this kind of populist, anti-elitism. And when executions moved into the bowels of prisons in the early 20th century, they were really becoming bureaucratic affairs, run by experts, carried out in front of a small group of professionals and clergy,” LaChance said. “It was a denial of the public’s right to see a punishment that was carried out in their name, in part because there were elites who thought that the public couldn’t handle this kind of spectacle, that they were misbehaving, that it would generate more disorder when an execution is designed to do the exact opposite: to generate order.”
Trump clearly thinks he is pushing back against elitism and expertise and giving people what they want, LaChance said, though the question many scholars have is whether doing so will “increase people’s bloodthirst” or force them to recoil — and ultimately decrease support for such punishments.
Eugene Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School, said Trump has publicly mused about killing people by firing squad for years, so Hegseth’s plans to use that method should not be surprising. However, the decision to livestream the killing is clearly a source of “dismay” for many. “Even people who are resigned to the death penalty, who don’t have religious or other scruples about the death penalty, have real heartburn over this,” he said.
Fidell said “brutality” has become an “operating principle” for the Trump administration broadly, with its decision to host an Ultimate Fighting tournament at the White House, its immigration tactics across the country and now its plans to livestream an execution — which Fidell said has “nothing to do” with deterring future crime.
“There’s a pathology going on here that is so out of keeping with the dignity that ought to characterize the taking of a life as a result of a legal process,” he said.
Robinson, of Appalachian State, said a student of his Friday morning asked what would happen when children tune in to watch the execution, which Robinson said he believes they will do, as if it’s a video game. He said the idea was appalling — and not just to him.
“I imagine the rest of the world, the civilized world, will see this and have the same response that I did,” he said. “They’ll respond with shock.”
Times staff writer David G. Savage contributed to this report.
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