AP (“Pentagon says the firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed“):
The firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed, the Pentagon said Thursday, a stunning revelation about plans for the first military execution in more than 65 years after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had described it as being “public.”
The Army announced this week that the execution would take place at Fort Hood on Dec. 3 after Hasan was convicted of killing 13 people and injuring 32 others in a shooting at the military base in 2009.
Hegseth, speaking to the conservative TV outlet Real America’s Voice on Wednesday, said, “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public.” Officials in the Pentagon clarified Thursday that the execution would be livestreamed and that more details would follow.
While I’ve grown increasingly skeptical about capital punishment over the years, Hasan would have been a clear case where it seems warranted. His crime was especially heinous, and there’s zero doubt about his guilt. The passage of almost two decades, though, makes justice considerably less than swift.
And turning the execution into a public spectacle makes me queasy. It seems like something from a bygone era, if not a Third World country.
It is unlikely to happen, at least on the announced timeline:
Hasan could choose to resist execution and file a habeas petition — a legal request to review the legality of a detention — in civilian court, which could significantly delay the execution, experts said.
“It frankly might outlast the current administration, and who knows if the next one will have the same penchant for executions,” said Eugene R. Fidell, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School specializing in military law.
I’m a bit surprised to see so many lauding the live stream:
Deborah Denno, a death penalty expert and law professor at Fordham University, said livestreaming an execution could make the process “much more transparent” and inform the public about all that capital punishment entails. Those are benefits that she said would be useful at a time when Pike’s botched execution has raised fresh questions about the manner by which criminal defendants are put to death for their crimes.
“I think it could possibly be a good idea because it would be transparent and the public would be fully aware that it’s happening,” she said.
When many states have had difficulty carrying out lethal injections due to difficulty accessing drugs or finding medical professionals willing to participate in executions, firing squads are coming to be seen as a less inhumane alternative, said Brenner Fissell, a professor at Villanova Law and vice president of the National Institute of Military Justice.
“Firing squads can be a quicker, cleaner, more precise way to execute a prisoner,” he said. “I don’t think that’s what’s motivating this. There’s a perceived masculinity and military-ness to firing squads that is part of the aura Hegseth is trying to emphasize — the ‘lethality culture.’”
Elisabeth Semel, co-director of the Death Penalty Clinic at UC Berkeley Law, said Hegseth’s announcement raises a host of legal and public policy questions, including concerns for the dignity of the defendant, who will be eligible to view the execution and what the Trump administration has in mind in opting for an unusual spectacle.
Though there has been long-running discussion about the idea of televising an execution, “I don’t recall a situation in which it was instigated by the government. I think that also raises serious questions about what is the motivation of the government,” she said.
“This is a president who’s about spectacle and that’s, I think, precisely the message that he intends to deliver,” Semel said, adding that she was skeptical that the administration had given a second thought to the legal and social questions being presented by the decision.
Of that, I’m reasonably certain.
MTN’s Brett Meiselas takes the skepticism a bit far (“Hegseth Wants Americans to Watch Executions Like Those in Iran and North Korea“):
The prospect of a public execution would place the United States in deeply troubling international company.
Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have documented public executions in Iran, where authorities have carried out hangings before spectators, and Afghanistan, where the Taliban has conducted executions in public. Reports have also described public executions in North Korea, while Saudi Arabia has a history of public beheadings, although its practices have changed in recent years.
The United States has not established that Hasan’s execution will be open to the general public or broadcast. But Hegseth’s promise that Americans will be able to watch raises a question that goes well beyond the death penalty itself: whether the Trump regime intends to turn an execution into a public spectacle.
We’re in increasingly poor company in executing people, period. Belarus is the only European country that still applies the death penalty, with most of the rest being autocratic regimes in the developing world.
Still, Hasan murdered multiple people and was convicted after significant due process. Prisoners in Iran and North Korea do not enjoy that luxury.
