Tag:Death Penalty

Death as a Service: What It Means When the Pentagon Livestreams an Execution

Posted on by Jaustin
Editorial paper collage in deep crimson and cream: a single centered electric chair cutout with a hand-drawn red marker circle — the Pentagon livestreaming Nidal Hasan's execution.

Death as a Service: What It Means When the Pentagon Livestreams an Execution

The Last Public Execution Drew a Crowd of 20,000

1936. Rainey Bethea, hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky. Twenty thousand people showed up.

They bought souvenirs. They bought the pictures. The crowd that came to see justice stayed to see the show, and the state watched its own ceremony turn into an entertainment product. Public executions had taught the government a lesson it never forgot: crowds don’t flinch at state violence. They enjoy it.

So the state moved killing behind walls. The corpse belonged to the state. The spectacle belonged to everyone else, and the spectacle was the problem.

Ninety years later, the Pentagon announced a livestream.

On December 3rd, 2026, the U.S. military will execute Nidal Hasan by firing squad at Fort Hood, the base where he killed thirteen people, and the execution will be livestreamed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explained why: “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it. That it’s public. Because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

Asked whether Hasan had made any final requests, Hegseth said: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3rd.”

The Man in the Wheelchair

Hasan was an Army psychiatrist. On November 5, 2009, he walked into the medical building at Fort Hood and opened fire. Thirteen dead. Thirty-two wounded. He fired nearly 150 rounds inside and kept firing outside, until two civilian police officers, Kimberly Munley and Mark Todd, shot him and put him on the ground.

The gunfire paralyzed him from the chest down. Hasan has been in a wheelchair since 2009. He was convicted by court-martial in 2013 of thirteen counts of premeditated murder and thirty-two counts of attempted murder. The Supreme Court declined to review his case last year.

One of the thirteen dead was Private Francheska Velez, twenty-one, pregnant. Witnesses heard her screaming “my baby, my baby” as she was shot.

Seventeen years later, the man who killed her is scheduled to die in a chair, strapped in, in front of a row of rifles, on the same base where she died. The state calls the operation “Resolute Justice.” It sounds like a video game update.

The Rules Say Lethal Injection. The Plan Says Rifles.

Here’s where the procedure starts to confess.

Army regulations say military executions are carried out by lethal injection. The Pentagon’s plan is a firing squad. A firing squad is a departure from the written rule, and the written rule is being set aside for a reason nobody at the Pentagon is eager to say out loud: lethal injection has become a gamble. Earlier this month, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row survived two doses of pentobarbital.

When the poison stops working, the state reaches for the guns.

This gives Hasan’s execution a pile of firsts. The military hasn’t executed anyone since 1961, when Private John Bennett was hanged. The Army hasn’t used a firing squad since 1945, when Private Eddie Slovik was shot for desertion in World War II. The federal government has never livestreamed an execution to the public. It will be the first execution broadcast in world history, and it will happen at 2 p.m. Eastern on December 3rd, at the site of the shooting, seventeen years to the day after the massacre.

The venue was not an accident. The original plan, part of an operation to move soldiers off military death row, called for executions at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Officials walked it back. The shooting happened at Fort Hood, so the killing will, too.

Symbolism as policy.

Why the State Stopped Executing People in Public

The United States did not move executions behind walls because it got squeamish. It moved them because public executions were a bad show in the worst way: the audience kept voting the wrong way.

In the old hanging days, the crowd did not stand there in solemn witness. It ate. It drank. It hooted at the condemned and cheered the hangman and grabbed for the rope as a keepsake. The state wanted the ceremony to read as justice. The crowd read it as an afternoon. Every public execution ended with the state handing its own authority over to a carnival, and by 1936 it was done. Rainey Bethea’s hanging was the last one, and the reason it was the last one was not mercy. It was embarrassment.

The state learned the lesson institutionalized in every death chamber since: killing is a state function, and state functions do not sell tickets.

So how the hell do you get from “state functions do not sell tickets” to “the Pentagon will livestream an execution”?

The answer is in the word livestream.

Debord Called This the Spectacle

Guy Debord is a French theorist from the 20th century who spent his career describing how social life gets replaced by its representation. In other words: we don’t live in reality anymore. We live in a picture of reality, and somebody owns the picture.

For Debord, the spectacle is not a collection of footage. It is a social relationship conducted through images. An execution livestream is that relationship in its purest form. One man dies, and the state’s bond with its citizens runs through a buffering icon.

The old public execution was a ritual the state staged in person. The livestream is a product the state ships. Twenty thousand people in a Kentucky field, or a platform’s entire user base staring at the same progress bar. Same ceremony. New distribution deal.

Watch the pieces fall into place. The platforms won’t say whether they’ll carry it. The FCC punted the question. Saturday Night Live is already running jokes. The most significant planned broadcast of the year is a state execution, and nobody in charge can tell you which app it will be on.

And here is the part that should make you slow down. Hegseth’s stated justification is deterrence: people need to understand there are serious consequences. But deterrence is a theory about preventing future killers. The livestream is a plan about reaching current viewers. The state isn’t trying to convince anyone not to shoot up a base. It’s trying to make sure the killing reaches an audience, because an execution that happens in private no longer counts as a consequence. It has to be seen to be believed, and it has to be seen to be real.

No conspiracy required. The spectacle doesn’t need a villain in a control room. It just needs the incentives to line up: a Secretary who wants a demonstration, a date on the calendar, a camera that already exists.

Who Isn’t in the Frame

Look at the announcement again. It names a deterrent. It names a schedule. It names a method. It does not name the thirteen dead, and it does not name their families.

There is no public conversation about what it costs the family of Francheska Velez to have the killing of their daughter’s killer replayed as scheduled programming. No conversation about the survivors, who will see the trailer for the event on a platform they opened for something else. The spectacle has no field for that. It never does.

That is the tell. A livestreamed execution is not justice with an audience. It is an audience with a body count.

The Arguments Nobody Gets to Finish

The case for broadcasting it is not stupid, and it deserves its say. Transparency. The public’s right to witness what the state does in its name. The families’ right to see the sentence carried out. All real.

But answer one question honestly. The people who most want to watch a man die at state hands, do they want to watch because they need to see justice, or because they’d have bought a souvenir in Owensboro? And the people who most need to see the state’s power, the ones who would rather look away, the livestream does not give them a choice. It does not ask for consent. It asks for attention, and attention is the only currency the spectacle recognizes.

The plan may not even survive. Hasan can still file a habeas petition in civilian court. One Yale law lecturer put it plainly: the case might outlast the current administration. What the stream would actually show, the volley, the moment, the aftermath, is undecided.

The state has announced a product before it has a distribution deal.

The Audience Is Part of the Procedure

Here is where the lens turns back on you.

The state abolished public executions because the crowd was undisciplined. It could not trust twenty thousand people to behave like a jury. The livestream solves that problem completely. Now the audience is assembled alone, each of us behind the same screen, present and absent at once. Close enough to see. Far enough to say we weren’t there.

The stream doesn’t need your approval. It needs your presence, and it has already banked it, because you are reading about it, because everyone is reading about it, because the announcement itself was the first episode.

Public used to mean the people could watch the state.

Now it means the state can watch you watch it.

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