Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Nidal Hasan, the man convicted of carrying out the Fort Hood massacre in 2009, would be executed by firing squad, and that the execution would be live-streamed by the Pentagon. It would be the first public execution in the United States in over a century.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” Hegseth said. “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said that the president had approved the firing squad plan.
The idea has earned widespread condemnation, including from politicians and religious leaders. Vice President JD Vance also distanced himself in public comments Friday.
JD Vance distances himself from Hegseth’s televised execution: “Look, if it’s ultimately livestreamed, I’m not going to be watching it” https://t.co/PnpmjfNTi0
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 9, 2026
“I don’t know that that’s actually going to happen,” Vance said Friday, per the Associated Press. “So whatever the controversy is about the method of the execution, I hope that people don’t forget that this is a guy who brutally murdered a lot of innocent people,” Vance said. “Now, that said, I mean, look, if it’s ultimately livestreamed, I’m not going to be watching it.”
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Trump confirmed Friday that he had authorized the plan.
President Trump on Friday said he “absolutely” authorized the Pentagon’s plan to livestream the Fort Hood shooter’s execution.
On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that Nidal Hasan’s execution by firing squad will be public. The ex-Army major was convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009.
— CBS News (@CBSNews) October 10, 2026
Vance is a convert to Catholicism, and earlier in the day, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had issued a strong statement condemning the idea of a live execution.
“It is with shock and great sorrow that I have learned of the Department of War’s decision to publicly livestream the execution,” Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, president of the conference, said in a statement, calling the idea “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered.”
Many on social media were strongly opposed to the idea.
I support the death penalty. God himself told Noah that those who willfully take the life of another should be executed.
The United States Army prohibits public executions, but the Pentagon does not seem to care about following its own rules.
The pagan Roman Empire relished the public spectacle of executions. Growing up overseas in an Islamic country, some executions were public. Christendom, over time, recognized that justice is not to entertain or titillate. Justice is not meant to be a spectacle.
In Ezekiel 33:11, scripture reads, “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.” Proverbs 24:17 echoes that for us. “Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when they stumble, do not let your heart rejoice.”
In Chapter 19 of De Spectaculis, Tertullian, one of the early post-apostolic church fathers, wrote about the public spectacle of executions in Rome. “It is good, no doubt, to have the guilty punished. Who but the criminal himself will deny that? And yet the innocent can find no pleasure in another’s sufferings: he rather mourns that a brother has sinned so heinously as to need a punishment so dreadful,” he wrote.
In Confessions, Augustine wrote of his friend Alypius, who, dragged into the Coliseum to see gladiatorial fights, shut his eyes, though not his ears. Upon the cheers of slaughter, he opened his eyes to the blood, and the bloodlust corrupted him. Augustine’s writing has long taught Christians not to be entertained by the spectacle of violence, as watching it can damage you.
I support the death penalty. Public executions are soul-twisting and we should not go down that road.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) October 9, 2026
Hasan should face the death penalty, but making his execution public and streaming it? Beyond disgusting. Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do. It should not be happening in America.
— Senator Thom Tillis (@SenThomTillis) October 9, 2026
The reason every Western country started putting executions behind curtains and stopped letting the public attend is because the public really really likes executions and crowd control was difficult and the whole lowbrow Dickensian spectacle of drunken cheering and souvenir selling and baying for blood was thought embarrassing and mean to the condemned. Plus, I suspect, fear of riots when activist judges delay executions at the last minute.
— tedfrank (@tedfrank) October 8, 2026
the Catholic Church racking up PR wins by saying shit like “we shouldn’t bring back public executions” and “your Claude app isn’t sentient” https://t.co/NgRErrHvmy
— one dozen bats at a keyboard (@PanasonicDX4500) October 9, 2026
Public executions. Net energy exporter. Gilded palaces. Humiliation at the hands of the Houthis. We’ve finally done it. We’re Saudi Arabia.
— willy 🌜💧 (@willystaley) October 8, 2026
Photo courtesy of an X screenshot.
