public execution

Iran. Afghanistan. North Korea. Somalia. And now, the United States.

If Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is to be believed, America will soon gain the dubious distinction of joining the only four countries on the globe that carry out executions in public.

Hegseth said Thursday that he wanted the execution of convicted F.t Hood shooter, Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, to be available for public viewing.

“It was a radical Islamist attack … so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be,” Hegseth said in an interview with far-right political activist Jack Posobiec. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it. That it’s public. Because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

The execution is scheduled to be live streamed Dec. 3 from the same military base where Hasan opened fire in 2009, killing 13 and wounding 32.

The planned public display is, in a word, barbaric. It’s the archaic act of tyrannical monarchies, staged in the shadow of a looming tower or in the town square. The Taliban and ISIS were big on public executions. So was Nazi Germany. They were either fighting a war on their own soil or had just come out of one. It’s a poor excuse, but the U.S. military can’t even point to that as justification for the animalistic intention of broadcasting a state-sanctioned murder.

Should plans for the livestream of Hasan’s killing become a reality, our peers will be countries that the U.S. has long held up as the worst of the worst. Oppressive “shithole” countries, to use a Trump term, that wield intimidation and the threat of death to keep their people in line.

Iran carries out its hangings in public squares, typically using truck-mounted cranes as makeshift gallows. The Taliban exacts its death penalty in sports arenas. Amnesty International reports that North Korea forced local residents, students and workers to watch the 2008 execution of 13 women and two men as a deterrent. Their crime? Attempting to flee to China.

Hasan, an Army psychiatrist and a Muslim, opened fire on dozens of his fellow soldiers as they were preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. He was reportedly angry about the U.S. involvement in the region and in Iraq. In court, prosecutors argued that he was radicalized online and motivated by an ideology that called for “jihad duty.”

His crimes were horrific, and he should be punished. Whether you believe in the death penalty or not (I do not), turning his execution into a morbid form of entertainment — or a warning to never do what he did — would mark a new low for this country.

And we are pretty low as it is. On Thursday, ICE agents in civilian clothing fired at least seven rounds, at 4 p.m. on a busy Manhattan street, into a car with a 5-year-old boy inside. They hit the driver, who survived, and by some act of god missed the child.

Federal immigration agents have shot at least 21 people, killing seven, since President Trump returned to office less than two years ago with the promise of cracking down on crime and making the country safer via mass deportations. The public execution of Hasan, who is a U.S. citizen, is being sold as part of that tough-on-crime initiative. Hegseth himself said the public killing is meant as a deterrent.

The idea that keeping a population safe requires removing the guardrails of civilized society is absurd, though despots throughout history would have us believe otherwise.

If Hasan’s death is televised, it will be the nation’s first government-sanctioned execution carried out in public since 1939. It will be the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and the first military death by firing squad, or “musketry,” since 1945, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The Army had planned a very different type of execution for Hasan. ABC News reported that officials were preparing to use lethal injection if Trump authorized the execution of one of the four prisoners on the service’s death row.

Trump’s approval of Hasan’s execution last Friday came days after a botched lethal-injection execution in Tennessee. Christa Pike, who was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder she committed as a teenager, survived despite being injected with two supposedly lethal doses. She is now said to be lucid and even walking.

Hasan, who is partially paralyzed and uses a wheelchair after being shot by officers who were responding to the Ft. Hood attack, will be put to death in a more dramatic fashion — and for everyone to see.

“The public execution even of one who has done grave harm will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people,” Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley said in a statement Friday. “The word of God exhorts us: ‘do not repay anyone evil for evil’ (Romans 12:17).”

A few congressional Republicans even broke ranks with their party and criticized Hegseth’s plans for the livestream. Sen. John Curtis of Utah posted on X that “a civilization erodes when it cultivates an appetite for executions as a form of entertainment. Secretary Hegseth’s plan to livestream the Fort Hood execution risks feeding that appetite.”

There is no reason the U.S. should stoop to the barbarism of public executions. It’s ghoulish, inhumane and a marker of tyrannical rule. Do we really want to join Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea and Somalia in the global hall of shame?

In confirming his plans to live-stream Fort 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 the 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.

Nidal Malik Hasan is shown in a courtroom sketch in 2013.

(Brigitte Woosley / Associated Press)

“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.

Soldiers hold a candlelight vigil at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, one day after Nidal Malik Hasan shot and killed 13 people.

(LM Otero / Associated Press)

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 live-stream of the execution, and expressed doubt that 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 it had taken steps to do so, including by “expanding the protocol” to include firing squads.

Five states currently allow firing squads to carry out executions: 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 fellow liberal 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.”

Kathleen Walter prays outside the Nashville, Tenn., prison where Christa Pike was set to be executed.

(George Walker IV / Associated Press)

Last week, a Tennessee inmate named 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 live-streaming of it.

Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said the center has “no record of any execution being live streamed,” and is “not aware of any regulation or precedent for a military execution to be live streamed 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.”

President Trump points to fans to as he walks to the stage at a political rally Wednesday in San Antonio.

(San Antonio Express-News via Getty Images)

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 ultimate 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 a firing squad should not be surprising. However, the decision to live-stream 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, from its decision to host an Ultimate Fighting tournament at the White House to its immigration tactics across the country to, now, it’s plans to live-stream 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.