In newly independent US, Americans debated whether public executions taught a lesson or just showed off the state’s power to destroy

A 1747 print of a public execution at the so-called Tyburn Tree, a gallows in London that served for hundreds of years as a site of hangings. William Hogarth

The proposed livestream of Nidal Hasan’s execution by a U.S. military firing squad gives an old question a new audience. Hasan, an Army psychiatrist convicted by a military court of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3, 2026.

Explaining the plan to make his death public, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that “people need to understand … there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”