The execution of Nidal Hasan, the perpetrator of the Fort Hood massacre, “will be public. We will ensure that people can attend. Because people must understand that actions of this kind carry very serious consequences. He will be executed by a firing squad. As it should be.” Reactions continue to follow the announcement by U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

U.S. Vice President Jd Vance said he will not watch any live broadcast of the execution. Asked about the compatibility of the Pentagon’s announcement with his Christian faith, Vance replied: “I don’t know if this will actually happen. This man carried out the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil outside of September 11.” “If it is ultimately broadcast live, I will not watch it,” the vice president added.

The bishops: “Barbarity”

The announcement of a live execution is “a barbarity,” says Monsignor Francesco Savino, vice president of the Italian Episcopal Conference for the southern region. “Hasan’s conviction,” Savino notes, “dates from 2013 and was handed down by a court-martial. What the Secretary of Defense has added in recent days is the public aspect: December 3 at Fort Hood, a firing squad, Americans allowed to attend and a live stream. That addition changes the nature of the act and turns it from an executed sentence into a lesson delivered using a body.”

“The last American public execution took place in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1936, before twenty thousand people who came as if to a fair,” Savino says. “One element remains new,” he adds, “and concerns streaming. The crowd in Owensboro was a body gathered in one place, exposed to neighbors’ gaze and capable of shame. An audience connected from home is counted in views and remains anonymous. An execution that becomes content enters the competition for attention, and what enters that competition ends up being packaged to be watchable. This is the shift that worries me more than the execution itself. The Secretary of Defense explained the point of the initiative: people must understand that certain actions have serious consequences. He thus assigns a pedagogical role to the execution, and at that moment the condemned becomes the instrument of a lesson addressed to others. Kant, who defended the death penalty, left us the formula that dismantles this scene: a human being must be treated as an end. A man killed to educate viewers is treated as a means.”

The head of the U.S. bishops speaks of a “barbaric promotion of a culture of death” in response to the Pentagon chief’s announcement of Hasan’s public execution. “Our God is the God of life: in no way can Hasan’s actions be justified, but this decision is a barbaric promotion of a culture of death and must be reconsidered,” Monsignor Paul Stagg Coakley tells Vatican media.

The president of the U.S. bishops says he learned of the Department of War’s decision “with shock and great sorrow.” “The word of God exhorts us: ‘do not repay anyone evil for evil,'” Archbishop Coakley continues. “A public execution, even of someone who committed great harm, will only further damage the moral fabric of our nation and will be rust on the conscience of its people.”

“Spectacularizing an execution is unacceptable,” notes Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin. “The president of the American Bishops’ Conference has already spoken on this, and this is the Church’s position: total opposition to the death penalty, as it is not compatible with human dignity and does not constitute any deterrent.”

UN: “Live-streaming a firing squad execution is a form of torture”

“A form of torture.” That is how the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights describes the decision to live-stream the execution of the Fort Hood attacker. “As the High Commissioner has emphasized in response to public executions in Afghanistan and Iran, public executions constitute treatment or punishment that is cruel, inhuman or degrading. Streaming an execution live is equivalent to a public execution and would violate the absolute prohibition on torture,” the Office of the High Commissioner said in a statement to AFP.

Amnesty: “Live execution is horrific”

“If the fresh horror of Christa Pike’s agonizing execution a week ago was not enough, today an even worse horror has been added with the announcement of a live-streamed execution,” says Riccardo Noury, spokesperson for Amnesty International Italy, to Adnkronos. He describes the announcement as having an overtly electoral tone, noting that Hasan could use available appeals and possibly survive until a later date, postponing the execution.

“If the United States wants to match the precedents set by Iran and Afghanistan, which carry out public executions to terrorize the population and send a brutalizing message—that violence is so commonplace it can be broadcast live—this would be truly horrific,” he stresses. Displaying this violence risks producing widespread violence within the community, conveying the message: ‘If the State does it, then I can do it too.'”

Unlike Iran and Afghanistan, “in the United States there is the possibility of avoiding all this through appeals to various federal courts, through public indignation and through the media. But the message is similar to that sent by Iranian and Afghan authorities: to showcase the state’s brutality in a bullying way, an exhibition of cruelty that brutalizes an entire population.” There is also the question of the condemned person’s dignity, which should not be taken away regardless of their crimes. Finally, Noury points to the hypocrisy of seeking to protect minors from online violence while broadcasting an execution live: “Will parents be asked to prevent children from watching?”

Nessuno tocchi Caino: “Return to the Wild West”

For Sergio D’Elia, secretary of the association Nessuno tocchi Caino, “this is a return to the past, to the Wild West.” He says that in America “with regard to the administration of justice we are returning to the Old Testament, ‘an eye for an eye,’ and, for security in general, back to the rifle.” D’Elia recalls that the United States had, in the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, a reference point that prohibited cruel and unusual punishments, whereas now “we are returning not only to the past of cruelty in the practice of the death penalty but also to its unusualness.” He adds he hopes the Supreme Court, which will almost certainly hear appeals from the condemned’s lawyers, will stop this anachronistic regression.

“A public firing squad has not been used in almost a century in the United States: it is cruel and unusual,” D’Elia continues, saying he struggles “to recognize the United States of hope, of the new frontier, of liberty, of civilization.” “A democratic state is measured also by how it administers justice in the face of the greatest dangers a community faces,” he concludes. “If the administration of justice denies the foundations of civilization, we must acknowledge a backward step that I hope is only temporary and ends with this administration.”

Experts: “There are no rules for public military executions”

“Hegseth’s words could be just an aspiration.” The Death Penalty Information Center casts doubt on whether a public, live-streamed execution of Nidal Hasan could actually be carried out under existing U.S. civil and military laws. “At present there are no regulations or precedents for an execution made accessible on the Internet or otherwise open to the public,” Robin Maher, the center’s executive director, told The Guardian. “Public executions typically occur in authoritarian countries to instill fear in the population and to demonstrate the government’s power of control,” she added.

The Center also notes that after President Trump approved the death sentence imposed by a court-martial—specifically by firing squad—Hasan, who is one of four prisoners on military death row and would be the first executed in 65 years, has the constitutional right to appeal the capital sentence in federal civil courts, a move that would suspend the execution for an indefinite period.

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