President Trump has authorized the execution of Nidal Hasan by firing squad, marking the first military execution in over 60 years.
The silence surrounding military executions that has held for more than six decades is set to break. President Trump has officially approved the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, the former U.S. Army psychiatrist who turned his medical station at Fort Hood, Texas, into a scene of carnage in 2009. The order, which signals the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and the first firing squad since World War II. was publicized Monday night by Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell on X with a stark declaration: “Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.”.
Secretary of the Army Adam Telle issued a formal order Tuesday mandating that the execution occur at Fort Hood on December 3. Yet, legal experts caution that the path to the execution chamber remains fraught with potential delays. Robin Maher. executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. notes that while the president’s approval is a significant escalation. it does not guarantee immediacy. Hasan retains the right to file a habeas corpus appeal in federal court—a move that has kept prisoners like Ronald Gray. whose sentence was approved by George W. Bush in 2008, on military death row for years.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. who had publicly pledged to see the sentence carried out. recommended the action to the president. labeling Hasan a “savage terrorist” who deserves justice without further delay. For the survivors and families of the 13 people killed and 32 injured during the 2009 shooting. the move marks the final chapter of a legal saga that spanned more than 15 years. Hasan. who shouted “Allahu akbar” before opening fire on troops preparing for deployment to Afghanistan. acted as his own attorney during his 2013 trial. Admitting his guilt while claiming he had “switched sides” against U.S. foreign policy, he remained on death row until the Supreme Court denied his final petition in the spring of 2025.
Behind this choice of method lies a shift in how the government views its own machinery of death. While the U.S. military traditionally utilized hanging—the last execution was the 1961 hanging of Private John Bennett for the 1955 rape and attempted murder of an Austrian girl—the landscape of capital punishment has changed. New Army regulations finalized in 2023 granted the president discretion over the method of execution. Experts like Eugene Fidell. who teaches military justice at Yale. suggest the pivot to a firing squad follows a broader federal push to make the death penalty viable again amid widespread controversy over lethal injection protocols.
There is a visible tension between the government’s desire for finality and the practical reality of these methods. Fordham Law School professor Deborah Denno. a long-time scholar of execution methods. argues that the choice is likely influenced by the recent. highly-publicized botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee. While firing squads are sometimes argued to be the “least inhumane” option because death can occur in seconds. they carry a history of “extreme barbarity” and operational failure. as seen in a recent South Carolina case where autopsy findings suggested shooters missed the heart. potentially prolonging a prisoner’s death.
This sequence of events reveals a system struggling to sustain a practice that, by most traditional metrics, is retreating. Death sentences in the U.S. have plummeted by 90% over the last thirty years. and 2025 polling from Gallup indicates public support for capital punishment has hit a five-decade low. As seven states now move to include firing squads in their statutes. the federal government is positioning itself at the forefront of this controversial return to older. more visceral forms of punishment. For now. Hasan remains at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. Kansas. one of only four people on military death row. waiting to see if December 3 will indeed be the day the military breaks its decades-long hiatus from the death penalty.
Nidal Hasan Donald Trump military execution firing squad Fort Hood death penalty