NACDL urges the administration to abandon a spectacle that would drag the nation back toward its darkest history of public killing, and renews its call to end the death penalty.
Washington, DC (Oct. 9, 2026) — The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) condemned the Pentagon’s plan to carry out the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan in public and stream it live, calling it an affront to human dignity on legal ground no U.S. court has ever tested. The execution is scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood in Texas. It would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961, the first military firing-squad execution since World War II, and the first public execution in the United States since 1936, when Rainey Bethea, a Black man, was hanged before a crowd of some 20,000 in Owensboro, Kentucky. No government in the U.S. has ever broadcast an execution live.
“The government is planning to kill a man on camera for the country to watch in real time,” said NACDL President C. Melissa “Missy” Owen. “This nation knows what public killing looks like: crowds at the gallows, photographs of the dead sold as souvenir postcards, and at its worst, the racial terror of thousands of Black Americans lynched as spectacle. We moved executions behind prison walls to leave that history behind. Broadcasting one live, in a production officials say they are staging for its symbolism, reaches back toward that dark history, not toward justice.”
Owen continued: “It also matters whom the government has chosen for this live spectacle. Nidal Hasan is a Muslim American of Palestinian descent. Livestreaming his death makes it look less like justice than vengeance, and invites the ugliest reading: that he is being made an example of for his faith and his origins as much as for his crimes. The state should give no one cause to see it that way.”
“Any defense lawyer who looks at how this death sentence was obtained should be troubled,” said NACDL Executive Director Lisa M. Wayne. “Mr. Hasan represented himself, called no witnesses, presented no mitigation, and made no argument for his own life. The Constitution forbids a death sentence without an individualized look at the person, and that look depends on someone making the case for his life. Here, no one did. That is exactly the outcome the defense function exists to prevent, and in a capital case the cost of getting it wrong is irreversible.
“The way the government intends to carry it out is just as uncharted. For a century, the law has moved executions out of public view. Courts have upheld the state’s power to keep cameras out and have found no right to televise an execution. No U.S. court has ever confronted the reverse: a government that chooses to broadcast one itself in real time.
“Proponents call the firing squad swift and certain. It is neither. When South Carolina executed Mikal Mahdi by firing squad in April 2025, his lawyers, citing a forensic pathologist’s review of the autopsy, said the shooters largely missed his heart, leaving him conscious and in pain for close to a minute. Now imagine that broadcast to the world. And consider the service members ordered to pull the triggers and run the cameras. Corrections officials who have carried out executions describe trauma that psychologists compare to combat. The state would inflict that wound on its own personnel, and on every viewer, in all our names.
“We have seen where this leads. Guatemala broadcast executions on live television in the 1990s. In 1996, one of two men shot by firing squad on national TV survived the volley and was finished with a shot to the head at close range. The broadcasts provoked revulsion at home and abroad, and Guatemala has carried out no execution since 2000. Today, even the regimes that still kill in public, including Iran, the Taliban, and North Korea, do not stream it live. This proposal would stand alone.”
“NACDL opposes the death penalty in all circumstances,” Owen said. “Leading criminologists find no evidence that it deters violent crime. It is applied with racial bias. And it cannot be squared with the fact that our courts convict innocent people: more than 200 people sentenced to death in this country have been exonerated since 1973. We call on the administration to abandon this execution, and we renew our call to end capital punishment. No person, however reviled, is the government’s to kill as a spectacle.”
Contacts
Jonathan Hutson, NACDL Senior Director of Public Affairs and Communications, 202-480-5343 or jhutson@nacdl.org
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers is the preeminent organization advancing the mission of the criminal defense bar to ensure justice and due process for persons accused of crime or wrongdoing. A professional bar association founded in 1958, NACDL's many thousands of direct members in 28 countries – and 90 state, provincial and local affiliate organizations totaling up to 40,000 attorneys – include private criminal defense lawyers, public defenders, military defense counsel, law professors and judges committed to preserving fairness and promoting a rational and humane criminal legal system.
