The U.S. Army will execute former Major Nidal Hasan by firing squad at Fort Hood, Texas on December 3, according to RedState, which first reported the date and venue. It will be the military's first execution since 1961 and its first firing squad execution in 81 years. President Trump approved the sentence after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recommended it, RedState reported.
Hasan was convicted in 2013 of the November 9, 2009 attack at Fort Hood's Soldier Readiness Processing Center, where he opened fire on soldiers and civilians preparing for deployment. Thirteen people were killed and 31 were hospitalized, according to RedState. It was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001 until the San Bernardino shootings in 2015. Hasan, then a psychiatrist awaiting deployment to Afghanistan, was sentenced to death by a military court.
The case has moved through the appeals process for more than a decade. The United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces heard Hasan's final appeal on March 28, 2023, and affirmed his death sentence on September 6, 2023, per RedState. Section 533 of the FY2024 National Defense Authorization Act later permitted appeals from the USCAAF to the Supreme Court. On Monday, Trump concurred with Hegseth's recommendation, clearing the way for the execution.
The venue is a break from recent history. Every military execution since the end of World War II has taken place at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Hasan will instead be returned to Fort Hood — the site of the attack — for his final sentence, a detail RedState described as poetic justice.
The Pentagon confirmed to Fox News Digital on Thursday that the execution is planned to be livestreamed. Fox News Digital also reported comments from Fordham Law professor Deborah Denno, a death penalty scholar, who told the outlet that the firing squad is viewed as "more certain," "quicker," and "the least inhumane method of execution" compared to alternatives like lethal injection. Denno said a smooth execution at Fort Hood could make the method a model for other jurisdictions.
"I think it's highly likely that if firing squad is successful here ... it seems conceivable that it would be used on other inmates as well," Denno told Fox News Digital. She noted that Idaho, Utah, and South Carolina have adopted the firing squad as a potential method as lethal injections have come under scrutiny.
On Thursday, Secretary Hegseth announced the execution would be livestreamed. Fox News Digital reported that the broadcast is expected to proceed on December 3.
Military executions in the modern era have been rare for decades. Timothy McVeigh was executed by lethal injection in 2001, but that was a federal civilian execution at a federal facility in Terre Haute, Indiana, not a court-martial sentence carried out by the armed forces. The last military execution was that of Army Private John A. Bennett in 1961, hanged at Fort Leavenworth for rape and attempted murder. The last firing squad execution in the U.S. military was in 1944.
Hasan's 2009 attack killed 12 soldiers and one civilian. Among the dead were pregnant soldier Francheska Velez, 21; Private Michael Pearson, 21; and Captain Russell Seager, 51, an Army reservist and nurse. Decades of delays followed as defense attorneys pursued appeals. The case became a political flashpoint: the Obama administration labeled the attack "workplace violence," a designation that survivors and families rejected, noting Hasan's contacts with Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemen-based al-Qaeda cleric, before the shooting. A Senate report later concluded the FBI and Army missed warning signs.
Our Take
This one is not complicated. Nidal Hasan murdered thirteen people in cold blood, in uniform, on an American military base, while shouting about Allah — and the federal government spent the next seventeen years treating him as a clerical problem, an appeals docket, and a case study for law review articles. The same bureaucracy that fast-tracks subpoenas against parents at school board meetings needed a decade and a half to figure out what to do with a self-radicalized officer who killed soldiers getting ready to fight terrorists.
The Obama administration's decision to call it "workplace violence" was not an accounting error. It was a policy decision: to protect a narrative about the religion of peace and to avoid naming the enemy even when the enemy wore our uniform and sat in our exam rooms. That choice did real damage. It delayed justice, it insulted the dead, and it signaled to every jihadi with a security clearance that the system would rather litigate than fight.
What changed was not the evidence. The evidence was always overwhelming. What changed was the willingness to act. Hegseth's recommendation and Trump's concurrence are the end of an era of squeamishness. The firing squad was specifically requested by Hasan's own defense years ago as an alternative to lethal injection, and the Army is going to give him the method he asked for — with, as far as we're concerned, all appropriate ceremony and no apologies.
The convicted man is not a victim. He is not a pawn. He is not a mental health case study. He is a mass murderer who targeted Americans in uniform on American soil and who has spent the last seventeen years benefiting from legal protections his victims never got. On December 3, he will receive the sentence a military court handed down in 2013.
Patriots, the real question is this: why did it take 17 years and a new administration to do what a court ordered more than a decade ago? Every day that Hasan sat on death row was a day the families of the fallen waited for a justice the system kept promising and kept delaying. That is the indictment. The execution is not the scandal — the delay was.
