The Pentagon will livestream the execution by firing squad of a former soldier later this year, turning the death sentence into a public event.
“It will be livestreamed,” a Pentagon official said on Thursday, after US defence secretary Pete Hegseth said the execution would take place publicly.
The Pentagon announced this week that US President Donald Trump had approved executing former Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan by firing squad at Hegseth’s recommendation.
Hasan opened fire on soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, killing 13 and injuring 32.
The US military last used the firing squad as a method of execution just after the second world war. Its last death sentence was carried out by hanging in 1961.
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Pete Hegseth says the execution of former army major Nidal Hasan will take place publicly
Capital punishment has been thrust into the spotlight in the US after the state of Tennessee last month botched the execution of a woman, Christa Pike, who ended up in hospital after surviving two doses of the lethal sedative pentobarbital.
Acting Army secretary Adam Telle said on Tuesday that Hasan, who was an Army psychiatrist, would be executed at Fort Hood on December 3 at 1pm.
On Thursday, Hegseth said: “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.”
Should the Pentagon execute Hasan publicly, the US will join the small number of countries, including Iran, Afghanistan and North Korea, that embrace the practice, according to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.
“It’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad. It hadn’t been since World War II, since we’ve done that,” Hegseth told Real America’s Voice, a rightwing TV network.
“I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II, which was ‘win’, which was ‘understand when the enemy attacks you, you stand your ground’.”
Hegseth called the Fort Hood mass shooting “a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks”, adding “so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be”. The Pentagon chose 1pm on a Thursday for Hasan’s execution because that was “when he did it”, he said.
Hasan, an American-born Muslim, shouted “Allahu Akbar”—“God is great” in Arabic — during the rampage. At his military trial, in which he defended himself, Hasan conceded that the evidence showed he was the shooter. He also said he switched sides against the US because of the Pentagon’s actions in the Middle East.
Trump has been a proponent of the death penalty for decades and signed an executive order restoring capital punishment on the first day of his second term in office.
The Biden administration had instituted a moratorium on the practice and former president Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of the 40 prisoners on federal death row in the final weeks of his presidency.
Executions in the US are generally witnessed by a group of people that can include the condemned’s family and lawyer as well as members of the media.
The US military has its own legal system, which is separate from that of the federal government. The last person it executed was Private John Bennett, who was hanged in 1961 for raping and attempting to murder an Austrian girl six years earlier.
The defence department’s last execution by firing squad was in 1945, when Private Eddie Slovik was shot for deserting.
Hasan is one of four prisoners on the military’s death row at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.
Additional reporting by Ella Lee in Washington