Livestreaming an execution could cause post-traumatic stress disorder in the viewing public, mental health experts have said after the US confirmed plans to broadcast the death by firing squad of a man who shot dead 13 unarmed soldiers. The US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, said on Thursday that Nidal Hasan, a former army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, would be executed by firing squad on 3 December. Officials later confirmed it would be livestreamed.
It is believed it will be the first public execution in the US in almost a century. Hegseth said: “It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” Experts said watching the event could result in lasting harms for viewers. Dr Simon Duff, a forensic psychologist at the University of Nottingham in the UK, said that while there was not a lot of research into the impact of watching an execution, studies examining journalists’ experiences of witnessing violence suggested evidence of trauma response.
Prof Rosalind Crone, an historian at the Open University in the UK, said: “Public execution in England and Wales was abolished in 1868 because of persistent and increasing concern about the effects of watching hangings on the crowd.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
