Oct. 5, 2026Updated Oct. 6, 2026, 9:33 a.m. ET
President Donald Trump has approved the military execution by firing squad of former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who carried out the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood that killed 13 people.
Trump approved the firing squad execution for Hasan at the recommendation of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced in a post on X on Oct. 5.
“Judgement day has finally come,” Parnell wrote.
The U.S. military hasn’t carried out an execution since 1961, according to data kept by the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. That year, the U.S. hanged Army Pvt. John Bennett at a Kansas prison for the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old girl.
Parnell said that Secretary of Army Adam Telle will set the time and place of the execution. It’s unclear how soon that could happen but Army Lawyer magazine reported in May that a president’s approval of a death sentence is the beginning of a potentially lengthy post-appellate court process.
A military execution involves putting to death a member of the U.S. armed forces. Hasan was a U.S. Army major who became radicalized and turned his gun on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas on Nov. 5, 2009. He was sentenced to death in 2013 following a court martial.
The development comes less than a week after the botched execution in Tennessee of Christa Pike, who was hospitalized in critical condition after two doses of pentobarbital failed to kill her on Sept. 30. The failed execution is shining a spotlight on the lethal injection method, which accounts for the vast majority of botched executions in the U.S.
Some states have turned to firing squads as the answer, and Pike’s failed execution could have helped sway federal officials to choose the method, said Columbia Law School’s Bernard Harcourt, who is writing a book about a botched lethal injection in Alabama involving an inmate he represented.
“Part of me thinks this might be a Tennessee effect,” “Harcourt told USA TODAY. “They just want to stay away from lethal injection because the method seems so defective right now.”
It wasn’t immediately clear on Monday when the last military execution by firing squad was though it appears to have been during WWII, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The Air Force Times reports that it was on Jan. 31, 1945, when a U.S. Army firing squad executed Pvt. Eddie Slovik for desertion.
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime and courts reporter who covers the death penalty, cold cases and breaking news for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat
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