The US military will livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at the Fort Hood base in Texas in 2009, a Pentagon official told Reuters, in what would be the first broadcast of a US execution.
Hasan is due to be executed on Thursday 3 December at the base where he opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun in a medical facility. He would be the first person executed by firing squad by the US military since 1945.
The plan comes amid heightened debate over the death penalty in the United States, after a botched lethal injection in Tennessee last week.
“It will be livestreamed. Details will follow,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who championed the push for a firing squad, confirmed the plan in a post on X.
Hegseth told the Human Events Daily programme that the execution was deliberately set for a Thursday at 1pm at Fort Hood, close to the time, day and place of the 2009 shooting, and that the decision had been an easy one.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” he said, adding that people needed to understand there were serious consequences for such acts. Asked whether Hasan had made any final requests, he said he did not care.
No precedent abroad
Media organisations have tried to televise US executions in the past, but the courts have blocked them. Experts said no other country is known to televise or livestream a legal execution. Public executions have become very rare worldwide, although Iran and Taliban-run Afghanistan are among the countries known to have carried them out in recent years.
“It would be extremely, extremely strange” to livestream the execution, said Eugene Fidell, a lawyer, author and military law expert who lectures at Yale Law School. As far as he knew, it would be unprecedented, he said. Hasan would have to sue in federal court if he wanted to stop his death being shown publicly. Fidell added that the Supreme Court had never addressed the question, and he wondered whether its current justices would take an originalist view.
Jonathan Lurie, an author and historian of military justice, said there was no compelling reason to make the execution public. “What’s the point of it? Who would want to see that?” he said.
Presidential approval
A military jury sentenced Hasan to death in August 2013 after finding him guilty of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder. The shooting came weeks before he was due to be deployed to Afghanistan. Hasan, now 56, was partially paralysed and has used a wheelchair since police shot him during his arrest.
Under US military law, the president must approve an execution by firing squad. President Donald Trump gave his approval on Hegseth’s recommendation, the Pentagon said on Monday. The White House declined to say whether Trump supported livestreaming the execution and referred questions to the Pentagon.
Death Penalty Action, a group that opposes capital punishment, said it would be the first US military execution since 1961. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, that execution was by hanging, and the last known executions by US military firing squad took place in 1945.
At least five US states have firing squads on the books, the centre said. In 2025, South Carolina carried out the country’s first firing squad execution in 15 years.
The Trump administration recently added firing squads, electrocution and gas asphyxiation to the permitted methods of execution for the gravest federal crimes. This was partly because drugs for lethal injections have become increasingly hard to obtain, and lethal injections have sometimes proved difficult to carry out.
In Tennessee, plans to execute a woman for the first time in more than 200 years went wrong last week when prison staff botched attempts to give death-row inmate Christa Pike a lethal injection. She survived and was taken to hospital. Her lawyers said on Wednesday that she had woken up “angry and confused”. They said she remains very sick and shackled to her hospital bed.
Extrajudicial lynchings in the United States, often of Black Americans by white mobs, were public spectacles well into the 20th century. Death penalty experts said the last legally sanctioned public execution in the country took place in 1936, when thousands watched the hanging of a young Black man convicted of raping a white woman.
(Reuters)
