For most Americans alive today, an execution is something that happens behind prison walls, observed by a small number of officials, journalists, lawyers and relatives of victims. Cameras are kept out. The public learns that a prisoner has died from a statement issued afterward.
On December 3, the Pentagon intends to do something radically different.
The U.S. Army has scheduled the execution of former Major Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad at Fort Hood, Texas, at 1 p.m. Central Time. Defense officials say the execution will be livestreamed, opening the final moments of a condemned military prisoner to a potentially national — and global — audience. The Pentagon has yet to say where the stream will appear or exactly what viewers will be allowed to see.
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| Families and U.S. Army personnel attend the November 10, 2009 memorial service for victims of the Fort Hood shooting. Photo: U.S. Army / Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public Domain. |
The case began 17 years earlier, in a crowded medical processing center at the same Texas base.
Thirteen dead at Fort Hood
On November 5, 2009, soldiers were waiting for medical examinations, vaccinations and deployment processing at Fort Hood’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center when Hasan, then a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun.
Thirteen people were killed and 32 were wounded. Hasan himself was shot by law enforcement officers as the attack ended, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down and dependent on a wheelchair. He had been due to deploy to Afghanistan within weeks.
Hasan later said he wanted to prevent American soldiers from deploying to Afghanistan and killing Muslims. During his 2013 court-martial, he represented himself and did little to contest the central facts of the case. At the beginning of the trial, he acknowledged that he was the gunman and described himself as a soldier who had “switched sides.” A military judge did not allow him to argue that the killings were justified as a defense of others.
Prosecutors presented nearly 90 witnesses. Hasan called none in his own defense and made no closing argument.
The military panel convicted him of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder. Five days later, on August 28, 2013, it unanimously sentenced him to death.
What followed was more than a decade of mandatory military appeals.
The Supreme Court declined to review his conviction in March 2025. President Donald Trump, whose approval is required before a military death sentence can be carried out, approved Hasan's execution on October 2, 2026. Four days later, Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle directed that it take place at Fort Hood on December 3.
Why a firing squad?
The method is striking, but it is not entirely alien to contemporary American capital punishment.
Lethal injection remains the dominant execution method in the United States, but years of difficulty obtaining execution drugs, failed intravenous procedures and litigation over drug protocols have pushed some jurisdictions back toward older methods. Five states — Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah — currently authorize firing squads in at least some circumstances. Idaho made the firing squad its primary execution method in July 2026.
South Carolina revived the method in 2025, conducting three firing-squad executions that year. Those were civilian state executions, however. Military capital punishment operates under a separate legal system.
The U.S. military's last execution was on April 13, 1961, when Army Private John A. Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth. The last known military executions by firing squad occurred in 1945.
Hasan's case therefore reaches far beyond a change in execution method. It marks the revival of a military power that has remained legally available but practically dormant for generations.
Why broadcast it?
That decision came directly into public view because of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Hegseth said the choice of Fort Hood, a Thursday and approximately 1 p.m. was deliberate: the execution is being arranged at the location, day of the week and roughly the time at which the 2009 shooting occurred. December 3 is not the anniversary of the attack, which happened on November 5.
He also made clear why he wanted people to see it.
Hegseth said the execution should be public because people should understand that acts such as Hasan's carry serious consequences. A Pentagon official subsequently confirmed that “public” would mean a livestream and said further details would follow. The White House referred questions about the broadcast itself back to the Pentagon.
That is different from saying spectators will be admitted freely to the execution site. Army rules traditionally restrict physical attendance to designated witnesses and officials. What the Pentagon is proposing is public access through a camera.
That distinction matters because the United States has spent almost a century moving executions in precisely the opposite direction.
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| U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan in an official military portrait taken in 2007. Photo: U.S. military / Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public Domain. |
When executions stopped being public spectacles
Public executions were once part of American life. Hangings could attract enormous crowds, and punishment was intentionally visible.
The case usually cited as the end of that era took place on August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky. Rainey Bethea, a Black man convicted of rape, was hanged outdoors before thousands of spectators. The spectacle surrounding his death helped accelerate the movement to take executions away from public spaces and behind prison walls.
That did not mean executions became entirely invisible.
When Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed by lethal injection in 2001, the Justice Department arranged a live closed-circuit television feed for survivors of the bombing and relatives of the 168 people killed. More than 200 watched remotely in Oklahoma City. But the feed was deliberately encrypted and restricted to eligible victims and relatives; it was not a public television broadcast or internet stream. Federal rules also prohibited recording it.
There was little public appetite for going further at the time. A Pew Research Center survey conducted before McVeigh's execution found that 24% of Americans supported televising it for the general public, while 73% opposed the idea. The poll is now 25 years old and cannot describe current opinion, but it illustrates how unusual the idea of a nationally broadcast execution was even in one of the most notorious terrorism cases in U.S. history.
A livestream of Hasan's firing-squad execution would cross the line that the government did not cross with McVeigh: allowing the general public to watch in real time.
Transparency or spectacle?
That prospect has produced an unusual debate even among legal experts who disagree over the death penalty itself.
Fordham University law professor Deborah Denno told the Associated Press that public viewing could increase transparency by allowing Americans to see what capital punishment actually entails rather than receiving a sanitized description afterward.
Others see the same visibility as the problem. Elisabeth Semel, co-director of UC Berkeley's Death Penalty Clinic, questioned the government's purpose in turning an execution into an openly viewable event and raised concerns involving dignity and public policy. Brenner Fissell of Villanova University argued that although firing squads can sometimes be considered a faster and more predictable execution method, the military symbolism of the firing squad also appears central to the administration's choice.
The timing adds another layer to the debate. Just days before Trump's approval of Hasan's execution, Tennessee's attempt to execute Christa Pike by lethal injection failed, leaving her alive and hospitalized after two doses of pentobarbital. The episode renewed questions about lethal injection and execution protocols across the country.
Capital punishment itself is simultaneously common enough to remain a regular feature of American criminal justice and rare enough to be concentrated in a small part of the country. As of October 8, 30 prisoners had been executed in six states in 2026. Twenty-seven states retain the death penalty, but two-thirds of U.S. states have either abolished it or gone at least a decade without carrying out an execution.
December 3 is not necessarily the end of the case
The date on the Army calendar is firm. The legal outcome is not.
Hasan has completed the direct military appellate process, but legal experts say he can still file a habeas corpus petition in the civilian federal courts challenging the legality of his detention or execution. Such litigation could produce a stay and delay the execution substantially — potentially for years.
A previous military death warrant shows how significant that possibility can be. President George W. Bush approved the execution of Army prisoner Ronald Gray in 2008, but a federal judge later stayed it. Gray remains on military death row. Only four men, including Hasan, are currently held under military death sentences at Fort Leavenworth.
Hasan has not publicly indicated whether he will launch such a challenge. Questions have also emerged about the process used to notify him of Trump's approval and his access to legal counsel, though the Army says it followed its rules and has not prevented him from communicating with lawyers.
So December 3 may bring the first U.S. military execution since the Kennedy administration — or another chapter in a case already stretching across nearly two decades.
What makes this execution different is not only the prisoner, the crime or even the return of the firing squad. It is the audience.
Ninety years after Americans largely removed executions from public view, the Pentagon is preparing to put one back in front of the public — not in a Kentucky parking lot surrounded by thousands of spectators, but potentially on millions of screens.
Sources
- Reuters — US to livestream Army execution of Fort Hood shooter, Pentagon official says
- Associated Press — Pentagon says the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed
- U.S. Army — Army Sets Execution Date for Convicted Murderer Nidal Hasan
- U.S. Army — Fort Hood shooter Hasan sentenced to death
- Death Penalty Information Center — Facts and Figures: U.S. Military Death Penalty
- U.S. Department of Justice — Arrangements for Victim Viewing of McVeigh Execution
- Pew Research Center — Public opinion on televising Timothy McVeigh’s execution