United States: Trump refuses to broadcast live the execution of a death row inmate

President Donald Trump said this Thursday that he would not broadcast live the execution by military platoon of death row inmate Nidal Hasan. The announcement of the plan for this live killing on October 8 by Defense Minister Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon sparked an outcry both in the United States and internationally.

Nidal Hasan, 56, was sentenced to death in 2013 for the murder of 13 people on the Fort Hood military base (Texas).

In the United States, J.D. Vance, the vice-president, said he did not want to watch the broadcast, as did the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson. The latter declared that he saw the public execution as a potential “recruitment tool for future terrorists”.

On a legal level, experts have noted that the official military regulations of the United States Army, which do not explicitly prohibit video broadcasting because they were written before the existence of “streaming,” could allow minors to watch it, which would violate a ban in this regulation.

Religious leaders, Catholic, Evangelical, Episcopalian and Jewish, have also condemned this project “to transform death into a spectacle”, as have human rights associations, like Amnesty International, which called for a blocking of mirrored video streams on the Internet.

Outrage, too, from psychologists and psychiatrists, like Thimothy Lasaca, who spoke on the online publication written by doctors KevinMD.com about the risk of “post-traumatic stress” for children exposed to such images.