President Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says Americans will be able to watch the December 3 firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth said. “Because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”
Hasan’s execution is scheduled for 1 p.m. at Fort Hood, approximately matching the time and place of the mass shooting. Hegseth called those arrangements a “no-brainer.”
Asked whether Hasan had made any final requests, Hegseth replied: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3.”
Death-penalty experts told Reuters that a livestream of the event would mark the first public broadcast of a lawful U.S. execution.
U.S. Representative Adam Smith (D-WA), the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, condemned the decision to make the execution public.
“Calling for a livestream of the execution of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is disturbing and makes a mockery of our legal system,” Smith said.
“There is a reason why we treat the meting out of justice with the seriousness it demands,” Smith added. “We are a democratic country and should take the rule of law seriously, not turn it into a spectacle.”
A military jury convicted Hasan in 2013 of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder and sentenced him to death. Trump approved the firing squad execution at Hegseth’s recommendation.
[NOTE: The Army had spent months preparing to use lethal injection for a military execution before Trump selected a firing squad, according to internal documents reviewed by ABC News.]
The execution would be the first conducted by the U.S. military since 1961 and its first by firing squad since 1945. The last widely recognized public execution in the United States took place in 1936, when Rainey Bethea was hanged in Kentucky, according to the Associated Press.
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