Pentagon confirms first military execution in 60 years will be ‘livestreamed’

The military’s first death-row execution in over 60 years will be broadcast publicly, according to the Pentagon. 

Department of Defense officials announced earlier this week that they would carry out the execution of Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. 

Secretary Pete Hegseth first told a reporter of 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 aboard the ship. 

Pentagon officials confirmed later that evening in an email to Task & Purpose that it would be “livestreamed.” 

Task & Purpose first reported that the Army was planning to carry out executions of prisoners on military death row in June under a plan, dubbed “Operation Resolute Justice.” Four soldiers are on military death row, but Hasan’s case stems from the most recent events. The original plan 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. 

Officials instead say that the execution will take place at Fort Hood, the site of the mass shooting. His execution is scheduled for Dec. 3.

Officials said 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. Earlier this month, the only woman on death row in Tennessee survived two doses of the lethal pentobarbital injections as part of her execution. 

In 2009, Hasan, an Army major, entered a hospital on Fort Bragg, shouted “God is great” in Arabic and gunned down fellow soldiers. 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.

Hasan will be the first soldier executed in more than 60 years, since Pvt. John Bennett was hanged in 1961 after he was convicted of the rape and attempted murder of a child. It would be the military’s first death-row firing-squad execution in 81 years, since the 1945 execution of Pvt. Eddie Slovik, who was court-martialed for desertion during World War II.

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