United States President Donald Trump has called off a plan to livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.
Trump said on Truth Social that streaming the execution might have been a strong deterrent, but that many well-meaning people would rather not watch. “He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed,” he wrote. He said victims’ immediate families could watch in person if they chose.
Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth supported the decision and the two were completely aligned.
How it got here
A military jury sentenced Hasan to death in 2013. Trump approved the sentence on 2 October, and the Army has set the execution for 3 December at Fort Hood. It would be the first US military execution since 1961.
Hegseth said in an interview the Pentagon would make sure people could watch it, and the Pentagon then confirmed to Associated Press that it would be livestreamed. No platform was named.
Criticism came from Republicans as well as Democrats. Republican Senator Thom Tillis called the plan “beyond disgusting”, according to NBC News. Keely Vanacker, whose father Michael Grant Cahill was killed in the shooting, told the Spokesman-Review the execution was a serious event and not there for people’s entertainment.
United Nations spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told a briefing in New York that a government executing someone in public or in front of live cameras was abhorrent.
The optics argument
Trump’s case for streaming rested on deterrence. Stanford law professor John Donohue argued the opposite in a commentary published by Stanford Law School. He said a livestream was far more likely to encourage future terrorist attacks than to deter them, and predicted it would further reduce support for the death penalty.
Elisabeth Semel of UC Berkeley Law told AP she couldn’t recall a government ever setting up such a broadcast. Fordham Law’s Deborah Denno took a different view, saying it could make the process much more transparent.
The US has handled this question before. When Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was executed in 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft arranged a closed-circuit feed for survivors and victims’ families only. He said at the time he didn’t want anyone buying access to America’s podium with the blood of the 168 people killed.
The execution remains set for 3 December, with victims’ immediate families able to attend in person.
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