The Pentagon confirmed it will livestream the Army’s upcoming execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in a 2009 shooting spree, a Pentagon official said Thursday. The execution is scheduled for Dec. 3, and Hasan will be the first person executed by firing squad by the U.S. military since 1945, shortly after the end of World War II.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth first disclosed the plans to broadcast the execution during an interview aboard a Navy ship Thursday. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it. That it’s public. Because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said. Pentagon officials confirmed later that evening in an email to Task & Purpose that it would be “livestreamed.”
Hasan, who was an Army major, entered a hospital on Fort Hood in November 2009, shouted “God is great” in Arabic and gunned down fellow soldiers, wounding 31 people. He was sentenced to death by an Army court-martial in 2013. Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his request for a review of the death row conviction.
The execution will be carried out by a firing squad of soldiers, a departure from the Army’s regulation on military executions, which states that they will be done by lethal injection, officials said. The execution will take place at Fort Hood, the site of the mass shooting, officials said. An earlier plan, dubbed “Operation Resolute Justice,” had called for bringing prisoners from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to the Federal Correctional Institution at Terre Haute, Indiana, where civilian death row executions have taken place since 2001.
Hasan will be the first soldier executed in more than 60 years. Four soldiers are on military death row, but Hasan’s case stems from the most recent events, according to Task & Purpose.
Sources: Army Times · Navy Times