Opinion: Livestreaming an execution is not transparency. It's spectacle.

Asked this week whether Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter scheduled to die by firing squad on Dec. 3, had made any final requests to the government that is about to kill him, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave an answer that said more about this execution than any legal brief could. "Don't care," he told the conservative outlet Real America's Voice. "We'll see him on Dec. 3." In the same appearance, Hegseth said the execution would be "public." The Pentagon clarified Thursday what that meant: the killing of a condemned man, by rifle fire, will be livestreamed.

No military execution has happened in the United States since 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was hanged, and the Pentagon says no service member has died by firing squad since the Second World War. Hasan, convicted of murdering 13 people and wounding 32 more in a 2009 shooting rampage at the Texas base, exhausted his final legal options when the Supreme Court declined to intervene in his case, a matter the court's own docket still records. Under military law, a court-martial death sentence cannot be carried out until the president personally signs off, which an Army execution order setting the Dec. 3 date says happened on Oct. 2. None of that is in serious dispute, including among people who have spent careers opposing capital punishment. What is newly, deliberately in dispute is the decision to broadcast it.

A public execution, by design

Elisabeth Semel, co-director of the Death Penalty Clinic at UC Berkeley Law, put the problem plainly after Thursday's announcement: in the long-running debate over whether executions should be televised, she could not recall "a situation in which it was instigated by the government" rather than demanded by journalists or advocates seeking accountability. That distinction matters more than it might first appear. Transparency, as a value, exists to let the public check the state's exercise of lethal force, not to let the state stage it. A government that volunteers the broadcast, unprompted, is not inviting scrutiny. It is producing content.

"This is a president who's about spectacle and that's, I think, precisely the message that he intends to deliver."

Brenner Fissell, a Villanova law professor and vice president of the National Institute of Military Justice, located the choice of method in the same impulse. Firing squads, he noted, have lately gained favor in several states partly as a practical workaround to the drug-shortage problems that have plagued lethal injection. But that is not what is driving this particular execution, he argued: "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.'" A method chosen for its symbolism, paired with a broadcast chosen for its reach, is not a policy. It is a message, and the message is aimed at an audience, not at justice.

The company this puts the United States in

The irony compounds when set against the administration's own recent rhetoric. Trump has repeatedly cited Iran's public executions as evidence of the regime's brutality, telling reporters in January that any resumption of hangings in Iran would be unacceptable and saying in his State of the Union address that "we stopped them from hanging a lot of them with the threat of serious violence." Whatever one makes of that claim, the contrast is now unavoidable. Amnesty International's accounting of executions in 2025 found that nearly every government that still conducts them publicly does so in a small, grim club: Iran and Afghanistan's Taliban authorities among them. A livestreamed firing squad, authorized by a White House that treats public executions abroad as a marker of tyranny, would put Washington inside the same frame it has used to condemn Tehran.

That comparison will strike some readers as excessive, given Hasan's crimes. It is worth being precise about what is and is not being argued here. Nothing about the dignity owed to a condemned man's death depends on sympathy for his crime; it depends on what kind of state carries out the sentence, and how. The United States has executed people by firing squad within living memory — Utah used the method as recently as 2010, under tightly restricted press access and no broadcast of any kind — and nothing about the legality of Hasan's sentence turns on whether cameras are present. The livestream is a separate decision, made separately, for reasons that have nothing to do with the sentence itself and everything to do with how it will be consumed.

What due process still requires, cameras or not

The broadcast decision has also overshadowed a quieter problem with how the execution order was delivered. John Galligan, a former military judge who has represented Hasan in civil matters, said Hasan told him that when officers at the facility notified him that the president had approved his death sentence, a chaplain was present but no defense attorney was, a sequence Galligan called a breach of Army regulations. An Army spokeswoman said counsel in Virginia was not "reasonably available to be physically present" for the Oct. 5 notification and that Hasan has not been barred from contacting his lawyers since. Both things can be true, and both are beside the point of the livestream decision, but together they describe an execution being carried out at speed and for effect, with the procedural guardrails treated as logistics to be managed rather than rights to be protected.

None of this requires overturning Hasan's conviction, relitigating his sentence, or pretending his crimes were anything other than what a military jury found them to be after hearing nearly 90 witnesses. It requires only recognizing that a state's authority to take a life carries an obligation to exercise it soberly, which a livestream, by its nature, forecloses. Television audiences do not watch a lethal injection or a hanging for information they lack; the fact of death is not in question. They watch, when invited to, because the state has decided that watching is the point. An administration that wanted genuine transparency could release records, allow credentialed observers, and publish the medical findings afterward, as other executions already do. It chose instead to make Dec. 3 appointment viewing. That choice will outlast whatever becomes of Hasan's appeals, and it will be remembered as a decision this country's leaders made freely, not one forced on them by any court, any statute, or any legitimate claim of public accountability.