There’s a Reason Pete Hegseth Chose the Fort Hood Shooter for His Grotesque Publicity Stunt
Slate · L · trust 31/100
Execution by firing squad is an especially brutal form of the death penalty. A promise to publicize the execution to the masses reeks of a bygone era of American disgrace, amplifying that brutality.
On Thursday, the Pentagon announced a plan to do just that when it carries out the execution of Nidal Hasan. Hasan was a member of the military when he murdered 13 soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has scheduled Hasan’s execution for Dec. 3. “Of course we’re going to do it at Fort Hood,” Hegseth crowed . “And do it on a Thursday and we’re going to do it at 1 o’clock—which is when he did it—and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad.”
The plan to livestream the proceedings is unprecedented in the United States. As the New York Times explains, “Releasing video of executions is most often associated with extremist militant groups like the Islamic State. …There are few countries that hold public executions.”
The most prominent of those countries is Iran .
Amnesty International is right to say that “executions in public serve no legitimate purpose and only increase the cruel, inhuman and degrading nature of this punishment.”
That is precisely the point of the Trump administration’s plan for Hasan’s execution. Hegseth says that he wants the American public to watch because they need to understand the “serious consequences” for Hasan’s crime.
But livestreaming Hasan’s execution will not be about transparency or a desire to help the American public better understand what the government does in our name. Instead, it will be the kind of spectacle of cruelty that has become a staple in the administration’s use of power, like having masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents roaming American streets or proudly posting videos of the American military killing people in boats off the coast of Venezuela.
Public executions were once a staple of American life. From the beginning of the republic, they were carried out in town squares across the country.
They were supposed to be moments of public education when citizens could witness justice being done and in which the condemned would deliver a “gallows speech,” acknowledging the sinfulness of the crime and repenting for what they had done.
Parents and teachers would often bring children along to teach them a lesson. The events would sometimes feature a choir, a preacher giving an “execution sermon” and the condemned, who was typically a man being hanged, giving a long speech to the crowd.
Occasionally executioners even achieved a kind of celebrity status. Arkansas’ George Maledon was so well-known that he was dubbed the “Prince of Hangmen.” Throughout Maledon’s career as a hangman, Arkansas newspapers regularly reported his identity and his role in executions.
But by 1936 when Kentucky carried out the last public execution, all that changed. Their educative purpose had given way to a circus-like atmosphere with thousands of people assembling to witness a gruesome event, often tinged with the brutal white supremacy of the Jim Crow south.
The New York Times recalls the event, which included an audience of 20,000 people, this way:
Kentucky was the only state still conducting public hangings, a fate reserved for what was viewed by Kentucky’s citizens as the most heinous crime: rape. The condemned was a young black man named Rainey Bethea. He had been convicted of raping an elderly white woman, a wealthy widow who was found choked to death in her bedroom.
Bethea’s execution carried with it the taint of a lynching as had previous public executions. And these executions seemed simply uncivilized, the sort of thing that decent people would not want to see.
Once new execution technologies like the electric chair became the preferred execution method, putting people to death in the town square was no longer feasible.
Scholars have claimed that there is something very different about the visceral experience of witnessing the state putting someone to death and the experience of watching that happen on television or a video feed. Wendy Lesser argues that such a viewing experience would be voyeuristic, allowing viewers to see from a safe distance something that is itself shameful.
What Hegseth intends to do would indeed be shameful. It would be the equivalent of the government producing and distributing a snuff film, a film that captures a real killing and uses it to appeal to viewers’ sadistic impulses.
Unlike lethal injection, the effects of which are often hidden behind a medicalized facade, the brutality of the firing squad is exactly what Hegseth wants Americans to see. Hasan will be seated in a chair with a hood placed over his head with a paper heart affixed to his chest. A group of anonymous men, each carrying identical rifles, will stand behind a wall cut with gun ports and on command shoot their high-powered rifles. The damage done to Hasan’s body will be devastating.
That’s why even Vice President J.D. Vance says he won’t watch it.
As though a nod to those racist public spectacles of yore, Hasan’s Muslim background almost certainly explains why Hegseth is so determined that he be the first to endure such a punishment in such a public way.
In the end, though, a brutal public execution will not bring honor to the American military or to this country.
It will unfortunately only confirm the widespread view that our country has lost its mind and abandoned any pretense to decency in its dealings with its citizens, or those of other nations. All of us will pay the price for Hegseth’s unspeakably vile publicity stunt.
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