Broadcast would mark first US military firing squad since 1945, the Guardian reports
The United Nations’ office of the high commissioner for human rights warned that broadcasting the killing would amount to a public execution and “breach the absolute prohibition of torture.” In Britain, which abolished the death penalty in the 1960s, Bridget Phillipson, the equalities minister and Labour party chair, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that she found the concept “rather disturbing.” She stressed that the decision was a matter for the US government, adding: “They are a close ally. Does that mean that we support everything the US government does? No.”
The Pentagon confirmed that the execution of Hasan, who has been left partly paralyzed and uses a wheelchair since being shot by a police officer during his 2009 arrest, would be livestreamed on 3 December, The Guardian reported. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed the livestream plan to the conservative broadcaster Real America’s Voice, saying people should be able to watch because they need to understand that there were “serious consequences” for such crimes.
When asked whether Hasan had made any final requests, Hegseth replied: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3.”
In the United States, criticism crossed party lines. Hillary Clinton, the former US secretary of state, wrote on social media: “A barbaric idea, beneath our dignity as a country. Push back on this.” Yassamin Ansari, the first Iranian American Democrat elected to the US Congress, posted: “In Trump’s America, we’re doing public executions now. WTF. This is what happens under brutal dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan. It’s all part of Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the United States.”
The Republican senator Thom Tillis said Hasan should face the death penalty but that broadcasting the execution was “beyond disgusting,” arguing that public executions were associated with oppressive regimes. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services committee, called the plan “disturbing and makes a mockery of our legal system,” while the Democratic senator Chris Murphy described public executions as “medieval.”
Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the livestream would be a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered.”
Others warned that the spectacle would be counterproductive and act as a recruiting sergeant for US enemies seeking fresh propaganda. Ned Price, a former deputy to the US representative to the United Nations, posted on X: “You can take it from those of us who’ve spent years working on terrorism: the surest way to spawn more radicalized zealots is to glorify violence, embrace a cult of death, and create a martyr for the cause. Or take it from [al-Qaida] and ISIS, whose tactics offer the closest modern-day approximation of Hegseth’s proposal. Either way, it’s hard to conjure a more vivid example of his trademark performative bravado, which routinely damages America’s image and, in this case, so ghoulishly leaves us more vulnerable.”
Hasan, now 56, was sentenced to death by a military jury in 2013 after being convicted of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder. Twelve of those killed and 30 of the wounded were soldiers, according to the Guardian account. The former Army psychiatrist opened fire with a handgun at a medical facility at Fort Hood on 5 November 2009 as soldiers waited for medical checks before deployment.
Under US military law, a president must approve an execution by firing squad. President Donald Trump did so on the recommendation of Hegseth, the Pentagon said.
The execution is expected to be the first carried out by firing squad by the US military since 1945, when Army Private Eddie Slovik was executed for desertion during the second world war. The last US military execution of any kind took place in 1961, when John Bennett was hanged.
US media have previously sought to televise executions but have been blocked by the courts, and no other country is known to televise or livestream legal executions, the Guardian reported, citing experts. Amnesty International recorded at least 17 public executions in 2025, including 11 in Iran and six in Taliban-run Afghanistan. In the United States, executions have been conducted privately for about nine decades; the 1936 hanging of Rainey Bethea in Kentucky is generally regarded as the country’s last public execution, although another hanging took place in Missouri the following year. The 2001 execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was made available to victims’ relatives through closed-circuit television, but was not broadcast publicly.
The plan comes amid renewed scrutiny of US capital punishment following the botched lethal injection of Tennessee death-row prisoner Christa Pike. Her lawyers said she awoke in hospital “angry and confused” and remained seriously ill and shackled to her hospital bed.
Eugene Fidell, a military law specialist at Yale Law School, said Hasan could seek legal action to block the public display of his death. Elisabeth Semel, co-director of the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Associated Press that the announcement raised “serious questions about the dignity of the condemned prisoner and the government’s motivation for staging such an unusual spectacle.” “This is a president who’s about spectacle and that’s, I think, precisely the message that he intends to deliver,” Semel said.
Justin Mazzola, deputy director of research at Amnesty International USA, said: “Livestreaming the taking of a life by firing squad would only compound the cruelty of the death penalty and perpetuate the cycle of violence that the authorities purportedly seek to end. This announcement adds to the display of cruelty that we have just witnessed in the senseless pursuit of the execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee. The US death penalty is irredeemably broken. It is high time that the US 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.” Other experts argued that public access could increase transparency around capital punishment. Deborah Denno, a death penalty specialist at Fordham University, told the AP that a livestream could make the process more transparent at a time when the botched execution in Tennessee had renewed questions about how the state puts prisoners to death.
It remains unclear whether Hasan will seek to challenge his execution in civilian court, a move that could significantly delay the proceedings.