Some Fort Hood victims’ families called Hasan’s sentence just
The Pentagon and White House did not respond Monday to questions about why Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended that Nidal Hasan face a firing squad, or when the execution might take place, after the Pentagon announced that President Trump had approved the plan.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement on social media that Hegseth recommended the firing-squad method and Trump approved it. “The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution,” Parnell wrote. “Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.”
Hasan, a U.S.-born Muslim who worked at Fort Hood, Texas, as a psychiatrist, was sentenced to death in 2013 by a jury of fellow officers for the Nov. 5, 2009, attack that killed 13 people and wounded 31 others. During the trial, Hasan acted as his own lawyer and offered no defense. Hasan said he was trying to defend fellow Muslims whom he believed had been unfairly targeted by U.S. forces, the Journal reported. A lawyer for Hasan could not be identified Monday, the Journal reported.
Families of some of the 13 people killed, and some of the 31 who were wounded in the attack, called the death sentence just at the time, the Journal reported.
The approval came days after Tennessee’s Republican governor halted executions in the state after a woman convicted of murder survived two doses of a lethal injection. The botched execution has prompted fresh scrutiny of the secretive supply chain for lethal-injection drugs.
Last year, South Carolina put to death a man convicted of a 2001 double-murder by firing squad, the first person in the United States to be executed that way in 15 years, the Journal reported.