The Pentagon has raised an unprecedented proposal: broadcasting the execution of Nidal Hasan live to the public. Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, remains on military death row. The Department of Defense says it plans to carry out his sentence by firing squad and stream the event online.
If the military follows through, it would mark the first public execution in the United States in nearly 100 years. But legal experts are already questioning whether military officials actually possess the legal authority to flip on a camera.
The Crime and the Sentence
On November 5, 2009, Hasan walked into a readiness center at the Texas base, shouted an extremist slogan, and opened fire on soldiers preparing for deployment. Thirteen unarmed people were killed, including a pregnant soldier. More than thirty others suffered gunshot wounds. Hasan was paralyzed after civilian police officers shot him during the massacre.
A military jury convicted Hasan in 2013 on dozens of counts of premeditated murder and attempted murder. The panel unanimously recommended capital punishment. Since then, he has been held at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, awaiting the end of a long series of mandatory military appeals.
A Patchwork of Execution Laws
Broadcasting a capital sentence immediately collides with decades of statutory and administrative rules. In the American penal system, the laws governing how an execution is observed depend entirely on the jurisdiction carrying it out.
- State prisons: Nearly every state carrying out executions operates under strict secrecy laws. Witness rooms generally allow only vetted relatives, victim families, officials, and a limited pool of reporters who must leave cameras, phones, and recording gear outside.
- Federal civilian prisons: Bureau of Prisons regulations explicitly bar cameras, recording devices, and live transmissions from the execution chamber at the federal complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.
- The military justice system: The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and service-specific execution manuals outline protocols for carrying out death sentences, historically preferring lethal injection or a firing squad. However, those rules were written to regulate who physically enters the death chamber, not to enable mass digital broadcasts.
The military has not executed any service member since 1961, when Army Private John A. Bennett was hanged for rape and attempted murder. There is zero modern precedent for an execution conducted by the Pentagon under the scrutiny of modern digital media, let alone a public stream.
Echoes of the 1930s
America has deliberately shunned public executions for generations. The last widely recognized public execution occurred in Owensboro, Kentucky, in August 1936. Roughly 20,000 spectators gathered in a festival-like atmosphere to watch the hanging of Rainey Bethea, a Black man convicted of rape.
The media circus that accompanied Bethea’s death disgusted lawmakers and prison administrators across the country. Within years, states moved all executions behind high stone walls and thick curtains, transforming capital punishment from a civic spectacle into a bureaucratic procedure conducted before small, quiet rooms of designated witnesses.
The Legal Roadblocks Ahead
Streaming Hasan’s death over the internet would almost certainly trigger emergency court filings on constitutional grounds. Defense lawyers would likely argue that turning an execution into a public media event constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment, which guards against humiliating or sensationalized corporal punishments.
News organizations have historically sued for greater access to execution chambers, citing First Amendment rights to observe state action. Yet courts have regularly pushed back, ruling that the public and the press have a right to gather information, but not an absolute right to bring recording hardware or video cameras into the room.
Presidential Approval Is Mandatory
Before any camera could be set up, the execution itself requires a step unique to the armed forces. Under the military justice system, no death sentence handed down by a court-martial can proceed without the explicit, signed approval of the sitting President of the United States.
Hasan still has legal options to exhaust, and any move to livestream his death would open up an entirely separate legal front. While the Pentagon may intend to broadcast the moment, judges and federal statutes will have the final say on whether the camera stays dark.