Executions in the United States have been conducted in private for almost a century—but that could change in December with the upcoming firing squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter. A Pentagon official confirmed to Newsweek that the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan will be livestreamed and that more details would follow, after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an interview that it would be “public.” It remains unclear whether members of the public will be allowed to attend in person. But it would mark the first time members of the American public could watch an execution take place since thousands of people gathered to watch hangings in Kentucky and Missouri in the 1930s.
Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), told Newsweek that the center has no record of any execution in the U.S. being livestreamed. "Our records indicate the last public execution was in the 1930s. We have no record of any execution being live streamed," she said.
The news has also raised further questions about how the death penalty is carried out in the U.S. following the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee last week. Polls have found support for the death penalty has been on the decline nationally over the last two decades. "Death by firing squad is always brutal.
Live-streaming it will turn that brutality into a spectacle of cruelty," Austin Sarat, a professor at Amherst College who has written extensively about the death penalty, told Newsweek. "Live-streaming will not educate. It will terrorize, and is beneath the dignity that we owe to anyone, even those who commit the kind of horrific crime that Nidal Hasan did." The 1936 hanging of Rainey Bethea is often considered the last public execution in the country, Michael L.
Radelet, professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder who has extensively researched executions, told The . Bethea, a Black man, was executed by hanging on August 14, 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky, according to the DPIC. Bethea reportedly confessed to the rape and murder of a 70-year-old white woman, but was never charged with murder, the center said.
A report in a local newspaper estimated that a crowd of up to 20,000 gathered to watch the 22-year-old man’s execution, which the DPIC said was held in a parking lot so the courthouse lawn wouldn’t be damaged by the crowd. However, another public execution took place the following year in Missouri. Roscoe “Red” Jackson, a white habitual criminal, was publicly hanged at 6 a.m. on May 21, 1937, according to a report in The Los Angeles Times.
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