The Pentagon will livestream the firing squad execution of Nidal Hasan, a former US Army psychiatrist sentenced to death for killing 13 unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced. The execution is scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood in Texas.
"We'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public," Hegseth said in an interview with Real America's Voice. "People need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types of things."
A Pentagon official told the BBC the livestream would be "unprecedented in the modern era" and "on uncertain legal terrain." President Donald Trump approved the execution, according to a Pentagon spokesperson. If carried out, it would mark the first military execution by firing squad since 1945 and the first public execution in the US in nearly a century.
Hasan admitted to the 2009 shooting. At his 2013 court martial, he apologized for "any mistakes" and said he believed he was protecting Muslims and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Legal experts flagged significant obstacles. John Mills, a lawyer working with death-row inmates, said the appellate process for Hasan remains incomplete and he is likely to seek federal court review. "I would be surprised if the execution happened," Mills said. "Seeking to make it livestreamed, a firing squad execution, is little more than attention-seeking by the Trump administration and is unlikely to occur, much less deliver any semblance of justice."
Eugene Fidell, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, called the decision "really unfortunate." "To livestream an execution is just so out of the Middle Ages," he said. He predicted legal proceedings would "last years" and extend "far longer than President Trump's term in the White House."
Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor who studies execution methods, noted that no US execution has ever been livestreamed. Most major social media platforms prohibit or restrict livestreams of executions. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, explicitly bans capital punishment livestreams. TikTok has similar restrictions. X removes content showing a person's death if the family requests removal. Truth Social, owned by Trump, lacks a live-video streaming feature.
The timing reflects Trump's swift overturn of his predecessor's federal execution moratorium. The federal government conducted 13 executions during the final year of Trump's first term, after a 17-year gap.