The attention-grabbing case concerns 56-year-old Nidal Hasan, who in autumn 2009 shot dead 13 people at the Fort Hood army base in Texas while shouting "Allahu akbar!". The act was described in a Senate report as the worst act of terrorism in the United States since September 11, 2001.
Nidal Hasan, who was a former army psychiatrist with the rank of major, was sentenced to death back in 2013. But only on Tuesday came the announcement when and how the death sentence will be carried out. He is to be arquebussed, that is, shot to death by a firing squad, on December 3.
Not since 1936 has a public execution been carried out in the United States, when a young black man convicted of raping a white woman was hanged in a parking lot in Owensboro, Kentucky in front of a crowd of 20,000. The reactions to the carnival-like atmosphere during the hanging led to it being the last in front of a large audience - until now.
In some cases, a small group of people have been able to follow an execution. When Timothy McVeigh, the man behind the bombing in Oklahoma City, was executed with a poison injection, survivors and relatives of the 167 victims were able to follow the execution on internal television.
According to the decision of US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the go-ahead from President Trump, the execution of Nidal Hasan will now be broadcast live. This means that the fatal shooting will be able to be viewed by an audience of billions.
Broadcasting executions, sometimes recorded on video, is otherwise a method that has been preferentially used by terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. But now it is the United States that is following in the terrorists' footsteps. It is in line with Hegseth's brutal world of thought and ideals of masculinity: the Department of Defense has been renamed the War Department, the armed forces are not to be "woke" but "lethal" and male military personnel are to undergo testosterone screening to increase aggressiveness and combat readiness. Hegseth explained that the execution is being made public "because people have to understand that there are serious consequences for such things".
The plans for Hasan's public execution also raise a number of moral and legal questions, beyond the issue of the death penalty itself, which is allowed in the US but banned in the EU and UK. The issue of the death penalty has taken on a macabre urgency since the botched execution of Christa Pike in September. She survived two doses of a lethal poison.
In the case of public executions, the main counter-argument is that they violate human dignity and that it is a return to medieval inhumane practices.
According to many specialists in international law, within the UN and other international bodies, public executions are a violation of human rights, as they constitute cruel and degrading treatment that turns the punishment into a public spectacle.
