A huge crowd gathers to witness the public hanging of Rainey Bethea in 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky. Public outrage over the spectacle made Bethea’s death the last high-profile public execution in the United States. The Pentagon wants to livestream the firing squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter.
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Getty Images/Hulton Archive
The Pentagon says it will livestream the planned military execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.
Hasan, 56, has been on military death row since his conviction and sentencing in 2013. His case returned to the public spotlight this week when the Pentagon announced that President Trump had approved his death by firing squad — a first for the military since World War II.
The Pentagon says Hasan’s execution will take place on the afternoon of Dec. 3 at Fort Hood, the site of his shooting rampage. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the proceedings would be available for public viewing.
“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 in a video interview with Real America’s Voice, a right-wing streaming network.
The Pentagon confirmed to NPR in a statement Friday that the execution “will be livestreamed,” saying details would follow.
But much remains uncertain. Legal experts have said Hasan could delay his execution by years if he decides to file a habeas corpus appeal in federal court. Michael Radelet, a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies capital punishment, says outside groups could potentially challenge the livestream plans too.
“Hegseth is a rather controversial person,” Radelet told NPR. “If he says, ‘Do it this way,’ it’s not at all clear that it will actually be done that way.”
If it does come to pass, it would be the first public execution in the U.S. in nearly a century — and the first ever to be livestreamed.
“Public executions have typically been held in authoritarian countries to instill fear in the population and to show the power and control of the government,” Robin Maher, the executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, told NPR. “We’re not aware of any regulation or historical precedent for a [U.S.] military execution to be livestreamed on the internet or otherwise made widely available to the public.”
The last high-profile public execution in the U.S. was 90 years ago
The last high-profile public execution in the U.S. was the hanging of Rainey Bethea — a Black man convicted of raping a white woman — in 1936. The case drew national attention.
Roughly 20,000 people gathered in the western Kentucky city of Owensboro, where workers had built a gallows near the riverfront, according to NPR station WKMS. People celebrated with “necktie” parties the night before and sipped soft drinks at the scene in what attendees and historians describe as a festive atmosphere.
“They sold sandwiches and they sold Coca-Colas, and you’d have thought it was a big picnic or something,” attendee Bill Shelton recalled in a 2013 oral history interview with the Daviess County Public Library.
The spectacle prompted a public backlash over the perceived barbarity of executions. Kentucky held a “semipublic” hanging in a prison yard the following year, Radelet said, before outlawing public executions altogether in 1938. There haven’t been any in the U.S. since.
He said the closest example was the lethal injection of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in 2001. The Justice Department made a closed-circuit telecast available for designated survivors and victims’ loved ones to watch remotely; 232 of them gathered in a viewing room in Oklahoma City to do so.
“It’s like getting rid of the guillotine — when it’s gone, it’s gone,” Radelet said. “There was no serious discussion about bringing it back.”
He said public executions fell out of favor for two main reasons: They are no longer widely believed to be a crime deterrent, and authorities became worried that public executions — especially those that went wrong — would turn people against the death penalty.
In fact, as part of that shift, executions have become less visible over time, Maher said. Initially, she said, states would conduct them in the middle of the night. Now, she said, some states that still carry out the death penalty have limited access for media witnesses.
“We moved away from public executions quite deliberately because they had turned into spectacles. That was not sitting comfortably with people anymore,” said Maher. “And I think there was a move away from that sort of circus environment to inside prisons in the middle of the night.”
Tennessee’s recent botched lethal injection of Christa Pike has reignited debate over the death penalty. Radelet thinks a firing squad execution — especially if it’s livestreamed — could further diminish public support for capital punishment, already at a five-decade low.
“There probably wouldn’t be too much blood, but enough to make people talk about it over their morning coffee, if they’re not sick,” Radelet said. “And that discussion might be yet another step towards abolishing the death penalty.”
Justin Mazzola, deputy research director at Amnesty International USA, said in a statement that Hegseth’s announcement “adds to the display of cruelty” seen recently with Pike’s botched execution.
“The U.S. death penalty is irredeemably broken,” he said. “It is high time that the U.S. authorities, at all levels, use their power to show human rights leadership and end this ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment once and for all.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks at a Maryland shipyard this week. His plan for livestreaming the execution of the Fort Hood shooter has been met with criticism and calls for reconsideration.
Stephanie Scarbrough/AP
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Stephanie Scarbrough/AP
Leaders call for Hegseth to reverse course
Hegseth’s comments were met immediately with questions, concerns and calls for reconsideration. On Friday, Vice President JD Vance told reporters, “if it’s ultimately livestreamed, I’m not going to be watching it.”
Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, released a statement saying a public execution “will only further undermine the moral fabric of our nation and be a blight on the conscience of its people.”
“In no way can Hassan’s [sic] actions be condoned but this decision is a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered,” he wrote.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., wrote on X that he supports Hasan’s death sentence, but called a livestream “beyond disgusting.”
“Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do,” he wrote. “It should not be happening in America.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, similarly mused on CNN whether Hegseth is “mimicking ISIS executions.” He called public executions “medieval” regardless of people’s feelings about the death penalty itself.
The top Democrats on both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees issued statements condemning the Pentagon’s plan. Jack Reed, D-.R.I., ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, called it “another stunt by Secretary Hegseth to distract from his tenure’s repeated failings” and “a gift to anti-American terrorist recruiters.”
“The Trump Administration should reconsider this abhorrent move, which only gives the shooter what he wants: more attention and more control,” Reed wrote.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., also called on the Pentagon to revoke its decision, saying “a country cannot condone livestreaming a man’s death for entertainment.”
“We are long past the days of public hangings in the town square,” she wrote on X. “Kids watch what our leaders do and say, is this kind of bloodshed really what we want them seeing?”
