Trump Administration’s Plan to Livestream Military Execution Faces Legal Scrutiny Over Lack of Precedent

The Trump administration’s plan to livestream a military execution for the first time in nearly a century has no clear legal precedent and revives a practice more commonly associated today with authoritarian governments, military law professors and legal historians have said.

 

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed on Thursday that the public would be able to watch the planned December 3 execution of Nidal Hasan, the former US Army physician sentenced to death for the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, which killed 13 people and wounded 32 others.

 

Hegseth presented the execution, which would be the first carried out by the US military since 1961 and the first by firing squad since the Second World War, as a means of deterring serious crimes.

 

“People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” he told conservative news outlet Real America’s Voice in an interview aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

 

His justification has failed to convince several military law professors and historians, who say changing public attitudes towards capital punishment have made public executions increasingly difficult to contemplate. The last public execution in the United States took place in the 1930s. Although some countries have carried out public executions in recent years, the practice remains rare.

 

Legal experts have suggested that the administration’s plan could be an attempt to generate political support for its renewed use of the death penalty, particularly following a recent botched execution in Tennessee.

 

“What is really going on here is basically a performative action and one that smacks of spectacle,” said Eugene Fidell, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and co-founder of the National Institute of Military Justice.

 

It remains unclear whether Hasan will seek a writ of habeas corpus to prevent the livestreaming of his execution or challenge the execution itself, Fidell said.

 

Fall And Rise

 

Hegseth’s announcement follows the botched execution of Christa Pike, a Tennessee woman sentenced to death for a 1995 murder. It was the second time the state had failed to execute a prisoner this year.

 

The United Nations Human Rights Office, which supports the abolition of the death penalty, condemned Pike’s failed execution as “abhorrent and cruel”. The organisation has also said that plans to livestream Hasan’s execution would violate the prohibition on torture.

 

The Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit organisation that monitors capital punishment in the United States, has no record of an execution being livestreamed.

 

Robin M. Maher, the organisation’s executive director, said in an email that she was “not aware of any regulation or historical precedent for a military execution to be live streamed on the internet or otherwise made widely available to the public”.

 

Public executions remain uncommon internationally. Amnesty International recorded at least 17 in 2025, including at least 11 in Iran and six in Afghanistan.

 

“Public executions are typically held in authoritarian countries to instill fear in the population, and to show the power and control of the government,” Maher said.

 

There is no federal law specifically prohibiting public executions, largely because there has been little public demand to witness them, Fidell said.

 

“Who would’ve dreamt that somebody would think of livestreaming an execution?” he said.

 

Executions carried out by US states had been declining for much of the two decades before a resurgence following the Covid-19 pandemic, driven largely by Republican-led states.

 

Twenty-four states and Washington, DC, have abolished the death penalty. Among the jurisdictions that retain it, only six had carried out executions this year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Florida accounted for the largest share, executing 16 people in 2026.

 

Several states that retain capital punishment have introduced restrictions on who may witness executions.

 

In Tennessee, state law limits attendance to immediate adult family members of the victim and the condemned prisoner, up to seven members of the news media and a small number of other individuals. Florida law requires a prison warden to select 12 citizens to witness an execution. By custom, those witnesses are drawn from members of the media, while other observers are largely excluded.

 

Opinion polls have also indicated a sustained decline in public support for capital punishment. A little more than half of respondents supported the death penalty for murder in a Gallup poll conducted last year, compared with nearly 70 per cent of Americans who expressed support for it when asked the same question 20 years earlier.

 

Trump’s Revival

 

Military law professors say the rationale for livestreaming Hasan’s execution remains unclear, even as President Donald Trump has sought to expand the use of capital punishment during both of his terms in office.

 

“There are always witnesses to any state-mandated or federal mandated execution, but to open it to a crowd hasn’t been done in almost a hundred years,” said Jonathan Lurie, a retired professor of American legal history at Rutgers University.

 

The US Bureau of Prisons ended a 17-year hiatus in July 2020 when it executed Daniel Lee after his unsuccessful appeal to the Supreme Court. The Trump administration then moved to carry out the executions of 12 more inmates during the remaining months of his first term. The final execution took place four days before President Joe Biden was inaugurated.

 

One of Trump’s first actions after returning to office last year was to sign an executive order rescinding the moratorium on federal executions introduced by the Biden administration. The order directed the attorney general to seek the death penalty for “all crimes of a severity demanding its use”.

 

It also instructed the attorney general to examine whether 37 federal inmates whose death sentences had been commuted by Biden could face capital charges at state level, while encouraging state attorneys general to pursue the death penalty more broadly.

 

Trump signed a second executive order during a law enforcement surge in Washington, directing US Attorney Jeanine Pirro to seek the death penalty wherever possible.

 

The Washington, DC, Council abolished capital punishment for local crimes in 1981. Pirro has said she will seek the death penalty for a Chicago man charged with murdering two Israeli embassy staff members last year if he is convicted.