Livestreamed execution plan puts US alongside Iran, Taliban in rare practice

Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, is preparing to livestream an execution—a decision that would place the United States in the company of Iran and Afghanistan, the only two countries that systematically conduct capital punishment in public view. The condemned man is Maj. Nidal Hasan, a former army psychiatrist scheduled to die on December 3 at Fort Hood in Texas, the same military base where he opened fire in 2009, killing 13 people. Hegseth has stated plainly that the execution will occur at the location and time of the original attack, and will use firearms, mirroring the method Hasan employed.

For most of the modern world, public executions belong to history. The United States largely abandoned the practice in the 1930s. Saudi Arabia, after decades of public beheadings in Riyadh's squares and provincial cities, has ended the tradition. Yet Iran and Afghanistan persist. In 2025 alone, according to Amnesty International, the Taliban carried out six public executions—four men shot dead in crowded sports stadiums across three cities in April, all with claims that due process had been observed. Iran conducted eleven public executions that year, including two young men hanged in Isfahan's central square in July. Human rights monitors have documented roughly thirty public executions in Iran over the past five years, with the pace accelerating following civil unrest and conflict with the United States and Israel. Many Iranian hangings have used cranes as makeshift gallows.

Historians and legal experts point to different purposes served by public execution. When state institutions are fragile or public confidence in the criminal justice system wavers, authorities may resort to public spectacle to demonstrate that punishment will be swift and certain. The practice also functions as a tool of terror, a visible warning meant to suppress dissent and cow populations into compliance. Armed militant groups have weaponized public executions to assert dominance. The Islamic State, which controlled territory in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2019, conducted thousands of public or videotaped killings—for offences ranging from homosexuality to theft—deliberately choreographed as broadcast spectacles designed to terrorize enemies, intimidate potential dissidents, and attract new recruits to the cause. Hamas, seeking to reassert control over Gaza in October 2025, executed six men accused of collaborating with Israel in a public killing; the group had livestreamed a similar execution on Facebook in 2017.

The global trend is unmistakable. In 2025, Amnesty International recorded 2,707 executions worldwide, the highest total since 1981 and a two-thirds increase from the previous year. More than 2,100 of those executions occurred in Iran alone, marking its highest execution rate in decades. Amnesty's analysis found that authorities across multiple jurisdictions had placed capital punishment at the centre of narratives about public security and tough-on-crime governance, using executions to assert state power and consolidate political control. The pattern was most pronounced in countries where governments had tightened their grip by restricting civic space, silencing dissent, and disregarding international human rights protections.

Hasan's case carries particular weight. He was a serving officer, a psychiatrist in the US Army, when he carried out the 2009 attack. His execution would mark the first public capital punishment in the United States in many decades. The last time American civilians and officials were permitted to witness an execution was in 2001, when survivors and relatives of victims watched Timothy McVeigh die by lethal injection for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. That execution was not livestreamed; it was observed in person by a limited group. What Hegseth is proposing would broadcast the killing to an audience of potentially millions.

Hasan retains legal recourse. He can launch appeals within the civilian federal court system, a process that could delay his execution for years. The scheduled December date remains subject to judicial intervention. Yet the defence secretary's stated intention signals a willingness to depart from decades of American practice and align the country's capital punishment procedures with regimes that use public execution as an instrument of state power and control.