By Phil Stewart
WASHINGTON, Oct 8 (Reuters) – The US will livestream the Army’s upcoming firing squad execution of a gunman who killed 13 people at the Fort Hood military base in 2009, the Pentagon said, in what would be an unprecedented broadcast of a US execution.
Nidal Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, is set to become the first person to be executed by firing squad by the US military since 1945.
The execution is scheduled for December 3 at the same sprawling Texas base where Hasan opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun in a medical facility. It comes amid heightened debate in the US over the death penalty following the botched lethal injection of a Tennessee woman last week.
“It will be livestreamed. Details will follow,” a Pentagon official told Reuters, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who championed the push to execute Hasan by firing squad, confirmed plans to livestream the execution in an X post.
Media have sought to televise US executions in the past but have been blocked by the courts. No other country is known to televise or livestream a legal execution, experts said.
Public executions have become exceedingly rare worldwide. Among countries known to conduct them in recent years are Iran and Taliban-run Afghanistan.
Extrajudicial lynchings in the United States, often by white mobs targeting Black Americans, were public spectacles well into the 20th century. The last legally sanctioned public execution in the United States was conducted in 1936, death penalty experts said. Thousands watched that 1936 hanging of a young Black man who had been convicted of raping a white woman.
Hegseth told the Human Events Daily program that deciding to execute Hasan by firing squad at Fort Hood on a Thursday at 1 p.m. — the approximate time, day of the week and location of the 2009 shooting — was a “no-brainer.”
“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,” Hegseth said.
Asked if Hasan had made any final requests, Hegseth said: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3.”
PRESIDENT MUST APPROVE FIRING SQUAD EXECUTION
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 Hasan, now 56, was scheduled to be deployed to Afghanistan. He was left partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair from being shot by police during his arrest.
Under US military law, a US president must approve an execution by firing squad. President Donald Trump did so on Hegseth’s recommendation, the Pentagon said on Monday.
The White House declined to say whether Trump supported the livestreaming, referring questions to the Pentagon.
The group Death Penalty Action, which opposes capital punishment, said Hasan’s execution would be the first military execution since 1961.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the 1961 execution was carried out by hanging.
The last known executions by US military firing squads were in 1945, the center reported.
“It would be extremely, extremely strange” to livestream the event, said Eugene Fidell, a lawyer, author and military law expert who lectures at Yale Law School.
While firing squads have a long history in American military law, as far as he knew it would be unprecedented to livestream or televise an execution, Fidell said, adding that Hasan would need to sue in federal court if he wanted to block a public display of his death.
“The Supreme Court has never addressed this question, and it’s an interesting question whether the current Supreme Court would put on their originalist hat and say, ‘Well, it was OK in 1790, so what the hell?'” Fidell said.
Jonathan Lurie, an author and historian of military justice, said there are no compelling reasons to make the execution public.
“What’s the point of it? Who would want to see that?” said Lurie.
At least five states have firing squads on the books, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. In 2025, South Carolina carried out the first such execution in the United States in 15 years.
Death by firing squad is one of several forms of capital punishment the Trump administration recently added to permissible forms of execution for the gravest of federal crimes, along with electrocution and gas asphyxiation.
The number of federal execution options was expanded in part because of increasing difficulties in obtaining drugs for lethal injections, which have also sometimes proved challenging to carry out.
Plans by the state of Tennessee to execute a woman for the first time in more than 200 years went awry last week when prison personnel botched attempts to administer a lethal injection, leaving the death-row inmate, Christa Pike, alive but hospitalized.
Her lawyers said on Wednesday she awoke “angry and confused” in a hospital. Pike remains very sick and shackled to her hospital bed, they said.
(Reporting by Phil Stewart; additional reporting by Jarrett Renshaw and Daniel Trotta; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien and Lincoln Feast.)
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