The last time the United States conducted a public execution, Franklin Roosevelt was in his first term, the New Deal was still being assembled, and most of the country learned about it through a newspaper the next morning. That was 1936. The practice was abolished not because Americans suddenly became more merciful, but because public executions had become something the government could no longer defend with a straight face — spectacles that drew crowds, that turned death into entertainment, that served no discernible penological purpose except to demonstrate that the state could do this to a person.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday that the execution of Nidal Hasan — the Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 others at Fort Hood in 2009 — will be livestreamed for public consumption. "We'll make sure that people are able to watch it," Hegseth told BBC News. The method will be a firing squad. The decision to broadcast it is deliberate. It is also, in a specific and measurable way, a break from nearly a century of American legal and institutional practice — one that requires more than a shrug.
This is not a defense of Hasan. His crime was what it was: mass murder, premeditated, carried out against soldiers in a place they were supposed to be safe. The question is not his guilt. The question is what the state is doing when it chooses to broadcast an execution, and who benefits from that choice.
Rainey Bethea was hanged publicly in Owensboro, Kentucky on August 14, 1936. An estimated 20,000 people attended. The spectacle drew national condemnation and accelerated the movement to make executions private. No U.S. execution has been publicly conducted in the nearly 90 years since.
The administration's stated rationale is accountability and transparency — the public has a right to see justice carried out. This framing does not survive scrutiny. Transparency in capital punishment means access to the process: the conditions of confinement, the protocols used, the training of the personnel, the chain of command that authorizes the act. It does not mean a broadcast. Transparency is a procedural value. A livestream is a media strategy.
There is a coherent logic to the decision, but it has nothing to do with accountability. This administration has, in a pattern documented across multiple policy domains, treated the instruments of state violence as political assets. The DOJ's earlier push to expand firing squad executions was framed as a response to lethal injection drug shortages — a practical argument. The decision to broadcast one is something different: it is an argument about what executions are for. The answer this administration is giving is: they are for watching.
The choice of method amplifies this logic. Firing squads are, by design, more visually dramatic than lethal injection. They are associated in the public imagination with wartime, with enemy combatants, with punishment that carries a particular kind of finality. Hegseth, whose tenure as Defense Secretary has been marked by a consistent effort to reshape the military's public image around toughness and spectacle, chose to announce the broadcast himself. Not the Bureau of Prisons. Not the Attorney General. The Defense Secretary. The framing is intentional: this is the military punishing one of its own, and you are invited to watch.
When the state makes an execution viewable on demand, it establishes a norm. The history of public punishment in democratic societies is not a neutral record. Public executions in England drew crowds who pickpocketed each other. Public hangings in the American South were social events — often photographed, sometimes sold as postcards. The academic literature on deterrence consistently finds that public executions do not reduce the crimes they are meant to discourage. What they do, reliably, is normalize state killing as a form of public entertainment. The audience does not leave chastened. It leaves having watched something.
Legal challenges to the broadcast are likely, though their outcome is uncertain. The Supreme Court has never ruled on whether the government is constitutionally required to make executions private — but it has also never been asked to rule on whether a government can livestream one. First Amendment claims cut in multiple directions: media outlets have argued for decades that executions are newsworthy events that the public has a right to observe; advocates for the condemned have argued that broadcasting an execution degrades both the person being killed and the society doing the killing. Neither argument has been tested against a deliberate, state-initiated broadcast designed for mass consumption.
The international comparison is stark. The United States is one of a small number of wealthy democracies that still carries out the death penalty. The others — Japan, Singapore, Taiwan — conduct executions in strict privacy, with notification to families often coming only after the fact. No liberal democracy has livestreamed an execution. The countries that have come closest to doing so are not the ones the U.S. typically invokes as peer comparisons. When Hegseth says "we'll make sure people are able to watch," he is positioning the United States in a particular corner of the international landscape — not inadvertently, but as a statement of values.
There is a direction to this that the administration prefers to ignore. If the purpose of broadcasting Hasan's execution is to let the public see justice, then the same logic would apply to every execution the state carries out — including the ones where the evidence is disputed, the process was flawed, or the condemned person's guilt is not as clear-cut as the government claims. The administration has not proposed livestreaming those. The selective application of "transparency" tells you that transparency is not the actual value at stake.
What the Pentagon is proposing is a broadcast infrastructure for state killing. Once that infrastructure exists — once an execution has been streamed and the legal challenges have been adjudicated — the question for the next administration, and the one after that, is not whether to build the platform. The platform will already exist. The question will be who gets to use it, and for which prisoners, and under what political circumstances. The precedent being set here is not about Nidal Hasan. It is about what the government will be permitted to do to the next person it decides the public should watch die.
The Fort Hood massacre was real. The grief of the families who lost people that day is real. None of that requires the government to turn the punishment into a production. The distance between "justice" and "spectacle" is the distance between a state that takes killing seriously and one that uses it as programming. Pete Hegseth just told us which one he is building.
