Trump Approves First Execution by Armed Forces Firing Squad in Over 60 Years

President Donald Trump approved the execution of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a United States Army officer who killed 13 people and injured 32 others in the 2009 shooting attack at Fort Hood, Texas, the deadliest ever at an American military base.

Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said on Monday that Hasan would be executed by firing squad and added that the Secretary of the Army would set the date, time and place of the execution.

If the order is carried out, Hasan, 56, will be the first person executed by the military justice system since 1961 and could be the first to be executed by the federal government since the deaths of 13 detainees in the final days of Trump's first term.

President George W. Bush had authorized a military execution in 2008, but it was later suspended and never carried out. At the end of 2024, President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of almost all inmates on federal civilian death row.

On November 5, 2009, Hasan, an Army psychiatrist stationed at Fort Hood, took a personal weapon onto the base and opened fire in a deadly attack that shook the U.S. military. Hasan claimed to have carried out the attack — which occurred at the height of the fight against terrorism after 9/11 — to wage jihad against what he called illegal and immoral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Hasan, who was shot during the attack and was paralyzed from the waist down, confessed to the murders during his court-martial trial and was convicted in 2013 of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder.

He is being held on military death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Hasan showed no remorse for his actions and told a military mental health board that he wished he had died in the attack so he could become a martyr. He added that if he ended up being executed, he would "still be a martyr."

Born in Arlington, Virginia, to Muslim Palestinian parents, Hasan studied at Virginia Tech and began training at military medical school in 1997. His view of Islam became extremist in the years before the attack.

In his statement, Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman, highlighted Hasan's jihadist motivations and inaccurately described him as a "convicted terrorist." In a deliberate decision by the Armed Forces, Hasan was not prosecuted on terrorism-related charges.

Hasan's execution could still be stopped. When Bush ordered the execution of soldier Ronald A. Gray, convicted of a series of rapes and murders committed in the 1980s, a judge suspended the order, saying Gray should have more time to file a federal appeal. Until 2026, Gray remains on military death row.

Private John A. Bennett was the last man executed by the Armed Forces. He was hanged on April 13, 1961, after being convicted of the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old girl while stationed in Austria.

There are four inmates on military death row awaiting execution. Unlike what happens in state executions, members of the Armed Forces cannot be executed without the president personally confirming the death sentence.