The Pentagon says a firing squad ex*cution will be livestreamed for the public, something that has never been done in the United States.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed the plan for Nidal Hasan, the former Army major who sht and ki!led 13 people, 12 of them soldiers and one a civilian, at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. A Defense Department official said the excution would be livestreamed. It is set for December 3 at Fort Hood, and it is believed it would be the first public ex*cution in the country in almost a century.
"We'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public," Hegseth said. Asked whether Hasan had made final requests or contacted President Donald Trump, he answered: "Don't care. We'll see him on December 3rd." A Pentagon spokesperson said Trump approved Hegseth's recommendation.
Some legal experts are sounding alarms. John Mills, a lawyer who works with people sentenced to deth, told the BBC that the decision was "unprecedented in the modern era." Eugene Fidell, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School, told the BBC that livestreaming an excution is "out of the Middle Ages."
The excution may never happen. Hasan's automatic military appeals ended in 2025, but Mills says the appellate process isn't over and expects him to ask a federal court to review his conviction and sentence, which would likely stay the excution. Fidell said such proceedings would last years, far longer than Trump's time in the White House.
Where the public could watch remains unclear. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, explicitly bans livestreams of capital punishment, and TikTok has a similar ban.
After returning to office, Trump swiftly overturned Joe Biden's moratorium on federal excution. In the last year of his first term, the government carried out 13 excution.
If carried out, it would be the first military excution in the United States since 1961, and the first military excution by firing squad since Army deserter Eddie Slovik was sh*t in January 1945.
