US military plans first public execution livestream in 90 years, reviving grim historical parallels

On a sweltering August morning in 1936, twenty thousand people gathered on a Kentucky riverfront to watch a man die. They had come from across the region—some sleeping overnight near the gallows to secure their spots, others arriving hungover after "necktie" parties the night before, where teenagers sold popcorn and soda to the assembling crowd. By 5 a.m., when Rainey Bethea, an orphan in his twenties, was led to the gallows, the spectacle had drawn press from Chicago and New York. He had been convicted of robbing, raping, and killing a seventy-year-old woman named Lischia Edwards. The previous afternoon, he had eaten his final meal: fried chicken, pork chops, mashed potatoes, pickled cucumbers, cornbread, lemon pie, and ice cream. That execution in Owensboro marked the last widely publicized public hanging in America. The circus surrounding Bethea's death so disturbed Kentucky's leadership that the governor outlawed public executions eighteen months later. By then, most states had already moved toward private executions, reflecting a broader shift in how Americans thought about justice and human dignity.

Ninety years passed. Capital punishment itself became increasingly contested. Public support for the death penalty fell from eighty percent in 1994 to fifty-two percent today, particularly when people were offered the alternative of life imprisonment without parole. America had, in effect, turned away from the spectacle of state killing. Then, in October 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the military would execute Nidal Hasan, who killed thirteen unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, by firing squad. The Pentagon added a detail that stopped scholars and ethicists cold: the execution would be livestreamed.

"People need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types of things," Hegseth said by way of justification. Michael Radelet, a University of Colorado professor emeritus who has spent decades studying capital punishment, told the BBC he was stunned. "I never imagined another public execution," he said. The livestream announcement seemed to him a fundamental misreading of where the country stood. Radelet worried aloud that the justification for executing Hasan had shifted from justice to entertainment—"bring your popcorn, invite your friends."

Sonya Lea, who published a book about Bethea's execution just the year before, felt what she described as absolute horror. Her own grandparents had been teenage newlyweds in that 1936 crowd in Owensboro; she only learned this after her grandmother died in 2002, when she found an account her grandmother had written detailing how close they stood to the gallows, close enough to hear Bethea's neck snap. Years of research into that execution had shown her how many Kentuckians remained haunted by it. "What they called it in 1936 was a carnival of sadism," Lea said. "That we now have the technology that can make it go wider than the twenty thousand people who showed up to witness in Owensboro, Kentucky, it just makes it even more horrific." She added that she had believed America had left such practices behind—practices now associated primarily with Iran, North Korea, and Afghanistan.

Other voices joined the criticism. The chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called the livestream announcement barbaric. Vice President JD Vance, himself a Catholic, said he would not watch. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Berkeley, pointed to survey data showing a declining appetite for violence in America. "A public execution is not who we are," he said. "It's not who we aspire to be as a country."

Yet Kurt Gray, a social psychology professor at Ohio State, offered a different reading of American sentiment. He suggested that polarization and harsh rhetoric in contemporary politics may have created space for such an announcement. Some Americans might welcome it, he said, while others had perhaps grown desensitized—not cheering the execution so much as accepting it as simply where the country had arrived. President Trump, when asked if he would watch, dodged the question but confirmed he approved the decision. "I really don't care how he goes as long as he goes," Trump said. "And I think that the death penalty is a very worthy way of going for him."

What remains uncertain is how millions of Americans will actually respond when the livestream begins. The Pentagon's decision to broadcast Hasan's execution has reopened a chapter many believed closed—one that raises fundamental questions about what a democracy chooses to watch, and what that choice says about the nation watching.