Plan to livestream Fort Hood shooter’s execution condemned
Rights groups, lawmakers and legal experts call Pentagon's plan to broadcast Nidal Hasan's firing-squad execution 'barbaric' spectacle that may breach US and international law
WASHINGTON (MNTV) — A Pentagon plan to carry out — and livestream — the firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan has drawn condemnation from human-rights organisations, lawmakers and legal experts, who call it a cruel public spectacle that may run afoul of US and international law.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced last week that Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people and wounding 32 in the 2009 attack, would be shot on Dec. 3 at the Texas base where the shooting took place — the US military’s first firing-squad execution since World War II.
Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle set the time for 1 p.m., the hour the attack began, and the Pentagon said the execution would be streamed publicly. Hegseth argued the broadcast would deter future attacks: “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”
The American Civil Liberties Union led the backlash.
“The death penalty is cruel, immoral, and does nothing to advance public safety,” said Yasmin Cader, the group’s deputy executive director.
“Turning an execution into a public spectacle only exposes that cruelty and violence. Authoritarian and extremist governments use public displays of violence to project a false sense of power. That is not who we are.”
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy called the plan “disgusting” and branded public executions “medieval,” likening the spectacle to killings staged by the Islamic State group.
Amnesty International said Hegseth’s comments showed an “appalling disregard for human dignity” and urged the government to intervene.
Legal experts questioned whether the broadcast is even lawful.
Clive Stafford Smith, a veteran human-rights lawyer, called it “barbaric” and said a livestream would likely collide with US laws barring the transmission of obscene or graphic material, particularly to minors, inviting court challenges over how children would be screened out and how the killing’s gruesomeness would be limited.
Others warned the plan could violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which bars cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment; the US ratified the treaty in 1992 but reserved the right to impose capital punishment.
Stafford Smith also cautioned that a televised execution could inflame further violence and turn Hasan into a “martyr” for some.
Rights advocates have separately objected to Hegseth’s framing of the case, which foregrounded Hasan’s Muslim identity and what the secretary called “radical Islamist” motivation — language they warn risks tarring the wider Muslim community for one man’s crime.
The gravity of the attack, one of the deadliest on a US military base, remains central: 13 people were killed and dozens of families devastated.
But experts argue that justice for that crime does not require staging an execution as public theatre — and that doing so, as Cader put it, says more about the state than the condemned.
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