Donald Trump approves US military’s first execution in six decades
US President Donald Trump has approved the firing squad execution of an Army psychiatrist who killed more than a dozen people in a 2009 massacre, in what will be the first execution carried out by the Pentagon since 1961.
The decision was announced on Tuesday (AEDT) by the Pentagon, and will be used to carry out the death penalty punishment for Nidal Hassan, who carried out the Fort Hood massacre in 2009.
The Pentagon’s statement said President Trump had formally approved the use of firing squad. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
The attack on a military installation in Texas killed 13 people and injured 32 more.
In a statement, Sean Parnell, spokesperson for Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, said the decision to use the firing squad was personally approved by the president.
“Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended – and President Donald J. Trump has approved – death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan, the jihadist who opened fire on unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009,” Parnell said.
“He killed 13 people and wounded 32 others while shouting “Allahu Akbar” during the attack.
“The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution. Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.”
In a reply to the statement on social media, Hegseth said: “Justice.”
Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, walked into a medical building where soldiers were getting medical checkups, shouted “Allahu akbar” – Arabic for “God is great!” – and opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun.
He said it was an effort to stop them from going to Afghanistan and killing his fellow Muslims and made almost no effort to defend himself at trial.
He told jurors that evidence would show he was the shooter and described himself as a soldier who had “switched sides”.
Nidal Hassan was convicted of killing 13 people in a mass shooting at a Texas military base in 2009. Bell County Sheriff's Department
Trump’s approval triggers a series of procedural steps toward carrying out the execution, but Hasan could put them on hold – potentially for years – with a habeas corpus appeal in the civilian federal court system, according to an article published in May in the magazine Army Lawyer.
Death sentences are extremely rare in the military justice system, and executions even rarer.
Four men, including Hasan, are currently on the military’s death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Former president George W. Bush approved the execution Army Specialist Ronald Gray in 2008 but it was put on hold by a judge and he remains at Leavenworth.
The decision to use firing squad comes less than a week after the failed lethal injection execution of Christa Pike. (Tennessee Department of Correction via AP, File)
The last man executed in the military system was Private John Bennett, hanged in 1961 for raping an 11-year-old girl.
The decision comes just days after the state of Tennessee botched the execution by lethal injection of Christa Pike.
The 50-year-old, who was convicted of the murder of Colleen Slemmer, 19, in 1995, survived two doses of pentobarbital in a procedure that took over an hour, with her attorneys claimed seven needles were injected into her arms.
She is now in hospital in a critical condition.
Asked whether the botched execution in Tennessee would lead him to seek changes to capital punishment, Trump said it was “an interesting situation.”
“It shouldn’t be very difficult,” Trump said of carrying out lethal injections.
– with Associated Press
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