Hegseth says public will be able to watch Fort Hood shooter's execution

Updated Oct. 8, 2026, 10:15 p.m. ET

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth said that the firing squad execution of former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan will be available for the public to see in what would be an unprecedented development in the history of the death penalty.

Hasan, who carried out a mass shooting at Fort Hood in 2009, will be getting a “firing squad of soldiers,” Hegseth said in comments to Real America’s Voice on Thursday, Oct. 8.

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” he said. “Because people need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things.”

Hegseth confirmed that the execution would be livestreamed by replying to a CBS News report on X and saying “correct.” Acting Secretary of the Army Adam Telle previously announced that Hasan’s execution would take place at Fort Hood on Dec. 3. Reuters reported that the Pentagon would announce further details.

USA TODAY could find no record of an execution ever being livestreamed by any government in the world. The nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center also could not find one.

“We have no record of any execution being livestreamed,” the center’s executive director, Robin Maher, told USA TODAY.

Maher said that Hegseth’s comments “may be more aspirational than based in reality.”

“There is currently no regulation or precedent for an execution to be livestreamed on the internet or otherwise made widely available to the public,” she said.

The last documented public execution in the U.S. was in 1936, when about 20,000 people attended the hanging of Rainey Bethea in Owensboro, Kentucky, according to “American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture,” a 2025 book by Sonya Lee.

Who is Nidal Hasan

Hasan was a U.S. Army major who turned his gun on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas on Nov. 5, 2009, killing 13 people and injuring 31 others. He was sentenced to death in 2013 following a court martial.

President Donald Trump approved the firing squad execution for Hasan at the recommendation of Hegseth, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced in a post on X on Oct. 5.

“Judgment Day has finally come,” Parnell wrote.

John Galligan, a lawyer representing Hasan in civil matters, called the decision “abominable” and “akin to a public lynching” in an interview with USA TODAY.

“Who in their right mind would want to livestream an execution,” Galligan, a retired colonel and a former military judge, said.

USA TODAY has reached out to military lawyers for Hasan for comment.

Hasan could file a habeas petition, a request to review the legality of a detention, in civilian court, potentially delaying the execution, according to the Associated Press.

However, it is unclear if the former major would do so.

During his trial he admitted to being the gunman and called no witnesses for his own defense, the Associated Press reported. Hasan also leaked documents during the trial that revealed he told mental health experts after the shooting that he could “still be a martyr” if executed, AP reported.

Hasan execution would be first military execution in decades

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.

The last time the United States executed a military member via firing squad was on Jan. 31, 1945, when Pvt. Eddie Slovik was executed for desertion, according to The Air Force Times.

The development comes about a 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 earlier this week. “They just want to stay away from lethal injection because the method seems so defective right now.”

Death by firing squad is one of several means of capital punishment the Trump administration recently added to permissible forms of execution for the gravest of federal crimes, along with electrocution and gas asphyxiation.

Reactions to execution livestream announcement

Death Penalty Action, a nonprofit that supports ending capital punishment, said in a statement shared with USA TODAY that Nadal’s execution is “just another Donald Trump distraction from his poll numbers.”

Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said the potential livestreamed execution “makes a mockery of our legal system.”

“There is a reason why we treat the meting out of justice with the seriousness it demands,” Smith said. “We are a democratic country and should take the rule of law seriously, not turn it in to a spectacle.”

USA TODAY has reached out to Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican chair of the House Armed Services Committee, as well as the chair and ranking members of the Senate Armed Services Committee for comment.