Before the mid-19th century, executions in America were presumptively public. Most prisoners were hanged on a gallows, following an hours-long affair that began with the condemned person’s exit from jail accompanied by ministers, the sheriff and his deputies, and sometimes a military escort. Spectators joined the humiliating procession, gathering by the thousands to watch the noose lowered over the prisoner’s neck. The sheriff would mount the scaffold to read aloud the death warrant, sometimes adding commentary, and at least one minister (often several) would issue sermons. The condemned was offered the chance to give a speech, with spectators standing so close that they could ask the prisoner questions and join him in prayer, or bid him goodbye, if he was a family member or friend.

All of that seemed safely confined to a past that the Trump administration now hopes to revive. President Trump, a consummate showman, has authorized the country’s first public execution in 90 years. The condemned prisoner is Nidal Hasan, a military psychiatrist who murdered 13 people and injured many more during a 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, in Texas. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said that the killing, scheduled for December 3, will be conducted by the military and publicly livestreamed. During his trial, Hasan alarmed his standby attorneys when he chose to defend himself, and mounted an argument that the lawyers considered tantamount to seeking his own death. He could still conceivably file civilian appeals, which could delay his execution substantially. If it goes forward, the administration surely hopes to make an example of Hasan to all who might be tempted by his worldview. But this strategy could just as likely result in unintended consequences, and pushback by the public.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: The way of the gun]

Public executions ceased not because those who clamored to witness them found the displays uniformly outrageous, but because politicians in the 19th century associated them with proletarian barbarity. Though these executions were theoretically meant to deter crime and exhort onlookers to practice proper Christian values, they were mostly entertainment, and did not always provoke the desired reactions. Some onlookers cheered and celebrated the killings; others sympathized with the condemned. Public executions of Black prisoners in the South, for instance, became opportunities for community, song, and displays of Black religious authority. Ministers preached sermons of salvation and sometimes protested that the prisoners were innocent.

In that sense, the public nature of executions backfired, and critics took note. Because the attendant crowds were so volatile, vulgar, and unruly, by 1860 all northern states had begun carrying out the killings in jail yards, which were much smaller areas, subject to tight government control. Decades later, the South followed suit. The large crowds soon vanished. Military executions, traditionally carried out by firing squad, were long conducted in small, controlled settings, often witnessed only by military personnel and chaplains. The last military execution in the United States was carried out in 1961.

Trump and Hegseth aim to have it both ways: a small, secure setting and massive crowds. This time, viewers will be watching a livestream on their screens, close enough to see the event but too far to smell the gunpowder. Both Hegseth and Trump seem intent on flexing America’s political power and military might as a message not just to foreign enemies but to the American people, as if to say: This could be you. This method of ruling by fear is central to authoritarian governance, and Trump and Hegseth seem drawn to executions partly for that reason.

But if Trump and Hegseth are hoping for a deterrent effect, they’re unlikely to get it. The idea that executions could deter other killers with political motives seems sorely mistaken; those who carry out such murders already know that they could face grave consequences, and have deemed that outcome acceptable. Nor do executions deter murderers without political motives, because deterrence is generated not by the severity of the punishment, but by the certainty of getting caught. And there is little certainty in American homicide investigations: In 2023, the nationwide case-clearance rate for murder was only 58 percent, meaning that murderers have decent odds of evading justice. Even if they are caught, they have good odds of avoiding the death penalty—only 23 new death sentences were handed down in 2025. Trump’s Department of Justice hopes to boost those numbers, but even if they tripled, they would add up to 69 death sentences spread across some 14,000 murders.

[Read: The problem with Trump’s crime claims]

Adding a livestreamed element is perhaps an attempt to intensify the intended deterrent effect, but it might have opposite consequences. Plenty of Americans would surely enjoy the spectacle of a public execution, just as people have historically. One can envision groups of people crowded around their phones, sharing chips and drinks, admiring the military pageantry. But it’s easy to imagine a different effect, too: Other crowds of people, other phones, entirely different impressions—that the death penalty is a disgusting violation of human rights that puts America in league with nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China. Or that Nidal Hasan is a martyr, and the United States is a savage country not worth defending—which is the narrative presented by Hasan himself. Before the shooting, he told family that he’d turned against the country he served upon hearing horrific stories of war from his psychiatric patients, and grew troubled by the fact that America was killing Muslims abroad. Carrying out his public execution would only credit the notion that this country is barbarous.

Yesterday, in an interview aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the United States would soon carry out its first public execution since the 1930s. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it,” he said. Pentagon officials later confirmed that the execution will be livestreamed. The condemned man is former Major Nidal Hasan, who shouted “God is great” in Arabic before murdering 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. Hegseth’s rationale for following this ancient practice is the same one offered by the ancients themselves: publicizing the agony of death and its unhygienic aftermath will remind onlookers that, in Hegseth’s words, there are “serious consequences” for treason. “No-brainer,” Hegseth said.

This pitiful creep—Hasan, I mean—deserves what he is probably going to get in December. The rest of us, however, will be ill-served by the spectacle of his execution. Many past criminals have had their head publicly cut off, or body nailed to a cross and left to rot there, as exemplary punishment. Such executions were once considered entertainment. Now the idea of recreationally watching a man be killed is so strange that few people understand what the experience will be like. Watching people die by violence, even if those people have it coming, damages the spectator irreversibly. I don’t mean physical or emotional damage, though many who see unnatural deaths up close do vomit and suffer from uneasy dreams afterward. Rather, I mean something more like the loss of their humanity and dignity, through partaking in the process of treating a person—in many ways so similar to themselves—like a machine to be turned off or ripped apart, a malfunctioning printer or an old car. To see this process is to be diminished, and the decision to make the execution visible to all is an invitation to self-harm, sent out to everyone with an internet connection. It is hard to appreciate how awful this viewing experience will be, until you have it. And then of course it will be too late. I have seen videotaped executions and have been diminished by every single one.

In August 2014, Hasan wrote a letter from prison to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then the leader of the Islamic State, and asked to be granted citizenship as a “soldier of Allah.” No response was recorded. Ironically, it seems likely that Hasan would sympathize with Hegseth’s penchant for public execution, because the Islamic State interpreted the Quran to require that execution be carried out in public. Fornicators, according to Quran 24:2, should be flogged, and their punishment should be “witnessed” by a “group of believers.” By extension, the Islamic State determined, such a group should witness the punishment of all scripturally ordained crimes. Certain crimes, such as brigandage, are to be punished with crucifixion, an inherently public method of killing that the Islamic State carried out on video. Regrettably, I have seen footage of such a death.

[From the July 2025 issue: Inside America’s death chambers]

In the years before Hasan’s 2013 court-martial, he stopped shaving, in Islamic defiance of Army regulations that prohibit soldiers from growing beards. Mike Simpson, an Army officer and emergency-room doctor near the facility where Hasan was incarcerated, told me a few years later that he put the word out to colleagues that if Hasan ever had a medical emergency (not unlikely, given that he suffered paralysis and other conditions after being gunned down in the course of his terror attack), Simpson would like to be called to shave Hasan personally. The shaving would arise out of medical necessity—the patient might need a mask, with a reliable seal around the face—but Simpson, for his own pleasure, wanted to shear the bastard himself.

But the pleasure that might come from shaving Hasan would be quite different from what one might experience by shooting him in the heart. The Army won’t struggle to find a dozen willing soldiers to act as an execution party for Hasan. Hasan has said he wants death. Hegseth said he “doesn’t care” what Hasan’s final wishes might be. But I suspect that the volunteers’ enjoyment of their duty will be dampened if they notice signs of ecstasy from Hasan, as he is tied to a post 15 paces away from them and prays his way to the end. Hamlet could not bring himself to kill Claudius in prayer, because killing him in the midst of a holy act—“to take him in the purging of his soul, when he is fit and season’d for his passage”—would be too merciful.

In this world, denying Hasan the pleasure of death on his own terms, and letting him instead spend a few more earthly decades in tedious incarceration, would seem a much more onerous punishment. Therefore I would propose an alternative to public execution: public incarceration. Hasan should be placed in a small space, with a Pentagon-funded livestream of his remaining years. If the purpose of the spectacle of his death is to demonstrate to others the “serious consequences” of murdering 13 people, I doubt any execution would be more frightening than the slow, public aging of this repulsive murderer, as biology and time carry out his sentence. I would tune in to the livestream myself now and then, until I grew bored and found better things to do, and better ways to spend my own remaining time. This would take Hasan’s life and make from it a small gift to the rest of us, rather than taking something irrecoverable from us as we give martyrdom to him.