The planned execution of Nidal Hasan is becoming a test not only of the death penalty, but of how far the U.S. government is willing to turn punishment into public spectacle.

The Pentagon says Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people and wounding 32 at Fort Hood in 2009, will face a firing squad on Dec. 3. The execution would be the first carried out by the U.S. military in more than six decades and, according to the Pentagon, will be livestreamed to the public.¹

The administration’s justification is deliberately blunt. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described the massacre as “a radical Islamist attack in uniform” and said Hasan would receive “a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be.” He added that the public should be able to watch because “people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”² The conservative framing treats visibility as deterrence and closure, particularly for victims and survivors. Fox News reported that the Pentagon confirmed, “It will be livestreamed. Details will follow,” while noting that Hasan’s execution would be the military’s first since 1961.⁴

Critics see the same decision as something fundamentally different: not accountability, but political theater. A military law professor warned that livestreaming “raises significant moral questions” and that making an execution a “public spectacle” echoes practices the country had supposedly left behind.¹ Guardian Australia columnist Paul Daley called the proposal “execution TV” and condemned what he described as “state-sanctioned killing as entertainment.”³

Both perspectives rely on Hasan’s established guilt and the victims’ suffering. Their divide is over what public justice should look like. For the Pentagon, broadcasting the killing reinforces authority and consequence; for opponents, it risks normalizing violence by packaging an irreversible act of state power as an event for mass consumption.