U.S. Plans Livestreamed Firing-Squad Execution After 80-Year Break

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the U.S. military would publicly execute Nidal Hasan by firing squad and livestream the execution.

Hasan killed 13 unarmed fellow soldiers in 2009 at Fort Hood military base in Texas. He was sentenced to death for killing 13 people. The Pentagon said the execution would be carried out by firing squad, a small team of shooters firing at once, and would be live-streamed BBC.

If carried out as announced, it would be the first U.S. military firing squad execution since 1945 Reuters.

Public executions have not been used since the 1930s. Rainey Bethea was publicly hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky on 14 August 1936. He had been sentenced to death for robbing, raping and killing 70-year-old Lischia Edwards. An estimated crowd of 20,000 attended BBC. That hanging was America's last high-profile public hanging. Kentucky's governor outlawed public executions 18 months later. America's final public execution before this announcement was a 1937 hanging in Missouri attended by a few hundred people.

Bethea was a Black man convicted of raping a white woman. The 1936 hanging in Kentucky is often described as the last public execution in the United States, a shorthand that obscures the smaller 1937 hanging in Missouri.

Fort Hood survivor Alonzo Lunsford supports Hasan's execution by firing squad. He told the BBC he has doubts about whether the public should be able to watch it BBC. In some U.S. death penalty states, the law requires volunteers with no connection to the crime to watch every execution. New Zealand's censor said it would be powerless to block the livestreamed U.S. execution Reuters. Legal experts said the legal path to challenge the livestream of the Fort Hood shooter's execution appears narrow.

The broader context here is the difference between a small witness group and a global audience. Historically, public executions were community spectacles where towns gathered to watch. Authorities later withdrew them behind prison walls, retaining only small groups of official witnesses, journalists and family members. A Pentagon-run livestream reverses that withdrawal while using a new mechanism, like expanding a small viewing room into a stadium with no walls. A livestream would extend that witnessing function to an unbounded audience. That audience would not stop at U.S. borders. The record shows crowds of 20,000 in Owensboro and a few hundred in Missouri, compared with a potential audience measured in networks rather than town squares.

In my view, three questions matter for practitioners going forward. First, control. A livestream can be copied, clipped and re-hosted within seconds. Statements that a foreign regulator would be powerless to block it acknowledge the limits of territorial content controls. Second, precedent. The facts establish a military break since 1945 and a civilian public break since the 1930s. Any resumption after such intervals creates a template for future cases. Third, consent. Lunsford's position captures the split. He backs the sentence. He questions the viewing. That distinction may shape litigation, press policy and congressional oversight, even if experts currently see a narrow path for a court challenge.

The plan remains an announcement. No date for the execution was included in the verified facts.