Pentagon to livestream firing squad execution of Fort Hood terrorist
The firing squad execution of a terrorist who killed 13 people at a US military base will be livestreamed, Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth said.
Nidal Hasan is scheduled to be executed on December 3 at Fort Hood, where he carried out his shooting spree in 2009.
Pete Hegseth said the execution of Nidal Hasan will be livestreamed. AP
Hegseth said the time and place, 1pm on a Thursday, was chosen because that was when the massacre took place.
"We'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public," Hegseth said.
"Because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things."
Hasan will be the first person executed by firing squad by the US military since the end of World War II. The military has not been involved in an execution since 1961.
"This is profoundly grotesque," constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis said.
“This is barbaric. Medieval. What is this country turning into?” Notre Dame University academic Emma Briant said.
Hegseth made the announcement on board the USS Abraham Lincoln, which was returning to the US after 321 days at sea.
He was asked if Hasan had made any final requests.
"Don't care. We'll see him on December 3," Hegseth replied.
Nidal Hassan was convicted of killing 13 people in a mass shooting at a Texas military base in 2009. Bell County Sheriff's Department
Hasan was an army psychiatrist serving at the base in Texas when he carried out the shooting.
He killed 13 people, not including an unborn baby, and injured 32 others in the mass shooting.
The shooting ended after he was shot several times by an intervening police officer.
As a result of being shot, Hasan was paralysed from the waist down and still uses a wheelchair.
At the time, it was the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil since September 11.
Hasan's massacre was motivated by Islamic extremism and he was found guilty of multiple murder counts.
His death will be the first public execution in the United States since Rainey Bethea in 1936.
Some 20,000 people watched Bethea be hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky after he pleaded guilty to the rape and murder of a 70-year-old woman.
The massacre was the worst act of terrorism in the US since September 11. AP
The spectacle of the execution was seen as an embarrassment, and public executions were prohibited in the state the following year.
The death penalty is under increasing scrutiny this week after the botched execution of Tennessee murderer Christa Pike.
Pike was given two doses of a lethal injection drug but survived.
She is now conscious in hospital and walking and talking, her lawyers have said.
“She is up and walking for the first time today, but just around the room, you know, not very far,” her lawyer Stephen Ferrell said.
“There could be some permanent damage. We don’t know that yet.”
The botched injections left her arms burned and blistered.
Tennessee has halted all executions for the rest of the year, and Pike's fate is up in the air.
Her legal team have argued the failed execution means she should not face execution again.
She was sentenced to death for the stabbing death of her classmate Colleen Slemmer when she was 18.
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