In a nation long searching for a humane way to carry out its most final judgment, the United States military is preparing to execute Nidal Hasan by firing squad — a method the Army last employed in 1945 — after decades of lethal injection failures have quietly unraveled the illusion of a painless death. The case arrives as federal enthusiasm for capital punishment is renewed under President Trump, prompting states to resurrect execution methods once thought consigned to history. What unfolds is less a story about one man's fate than about a society still grappling with whether any method of st
US Military Revives Firing Squads as Death Penalty Methods Multiply Amid Botched Executions
Nidal Hasan fatally shot 13 unarmed US soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009; Christa Pike survived a botched lethal injection execution.
Every method can inflict severe pain, especially when something goes wrong.
Mark
Why is the military suddenly reviving firing squads now, after eighty years?
Mimi
Lethal injection has failed repeatedly, and states are running out of the drugs. The pharmaceutical companies won't sell execution drugs anymore because they were made to save lives. So officials are looking backward to methods they thought they'd left behind.
Luke
But is firing squad actually more reliable, or just less visible? We have documented cases of bullets missing vital organs.
Mimi
That's the uncomfortable truth—every method can go wrong. The difference is that firing squad is at least straightforward. There's no chemistry, no expired drugs, no medical complications.
Mark
What about the people administering these executions? Are they trained?
Mimi
That's a major problem. Many states don't disclose who's doing the executions or what training they've had. Inadequate staff training is a recurring cause of botched executions.
Luke
So we're essentially experimenting on prisoners because we can't get the drugs we want and we won't invest in proper training.
Mimi
That's one way to frame it. Another is that states are trying to solve an impossible problem—how to kill someone in a way that looks humane.
Mark
Is there any medical oversight?
Mimi
No. The American Medical Association forbids doctors from participating in executions. So there's no professional supervision of any of these methods.
Luke
And Trump's just brought back federal executions and is talking about expanding the death penalty to drug dealers and human traffickers.
Mimi
Yes. His administration sees capital punishment as essential. That's driving state legislatures to reauthorize methods they'd abandoned.
Mark
So we're about to see more executions using methods we know are unreliable.
Mimi
That's the trajectory, yes.
Le Pouls
- Decades of botched lethal injections — fifty-one of sixty-four documented failures — have shattered confidence in the method America adopted to make executions appear civilized.
- Christa Pike survived her own execution; Kenneth Eugene Smith thrashed for twenty-five minutes in a nitrogen gas chamber; Pedro Medina's head caught fire in an electric chair — the archive of suffering is long and growing.
- States are scrambling toward firing squads, electric chairs, and nitrogen gas not out of conviction but out of desperation, as pharmaceutical companies refuse to supply drugs and trained medical staff refuse to participate.
- President Trump's reinstatement of the federal death penalty and calls to expand its reach have energized state legislatures to reauthorize methods that carry their own well-documented histories of catastrophic error.
- The military's decision to livestream Hasan's firing squad execution places the nation's unresolved reckoning with capital punishment directly in front of the public eye.
In a nation long searching for a humane way to carry out its most final judgment, the United States military is preparing to execute Nidal Hasan by firing squad — a method the Army last employed in 1945 — after decades of lethal injection failures have quietly unraveled the illusion of a painless death. The case arrives as federal enthusiasm for capital punishment is renewed under President Trump, prompting states to resurrect execution methods once thought consigned to history. What unfolds is less a story about one man's fate than about a society still grappling with whether any method of state-sanctioned death can be made to look like justice.
The US military is preparing to execute Nidal Hasan — the former Army psychiatrist who killed thirteen unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 — by firing squad, a method the Army has not used since 1945. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the execution would be livestreamed, signaling not just a legal proceeding but a public statement about the direction of American capital punishment.
The decision reflects a broader crisis in how the United States carries out executions. Lethal injection, introduced in Texas in 1982 and adopted as the default method across most states, has accumulated a damning record. The Death Penalty Information Center documents that fifty-one of sixty-four botched executions over the past half-century involved lethal injection. Christa Pike, convicted of murdering a classmate, survived a failed injection and was discharged from the hospital ten days later. Witnesses heard her crying throughout the procedure. Medical experts like Atlanta anesthesiologist Dr. Joel Zivot describe the method not as peaceful but as potentially causing pulmonary edema — the sensation of drowning from the inside.
The failures stem from multiple directions at once: inadequate staff training, degraded or improperly stored drugs, untested chemical combinations, and pharmaceutical companies increasingly unwilling to supply medications developed to save lives for use in executions. The result has pushed states toward older methods. Alabama and Louisiana have turned to nitrogen gas, but Kenneth Eugene Smith's execution in Alabama took twenty-five minutes and involved violent convulsions. Nine states now authorize the electric chair. South Carolina has made it the default. The firing squad, too, has misfired — Mikahl Mahdi's execution last year saw bullets miss his heart entirely.
The political climate has accelerated these shifts. President Trump reinstated the federal death penalty upon returning to office in 2025, framing it as an essential deterrent and calling for its expansion to cover drug traffickers, human traffickers, and those who kill police officers. His signal has prompted considerable legislative activity in states seeking to reauthorize alternative methods. Medical associations, meanwhile, have largely withdrawn their members from participation, leaving executions in the hands of those with diminishing expertise.
For Alonzo Lunsford, a former Army sergeant who survived being shot seven times by Hasan at Fort Hood, the firing squad carries a grim logic — a soldier's death for a soldier's crime. As the military prepares to broadcast the execution, the country finds itself at an uncomfortable threshold: having abandoned the method it adopted to appear humane, and returning to older techniques whose capacity for suffering is written plainly in the historical record.
The US military is preparing to execute Nidal Hasan by firing squad, a method the Army has not used since 1945. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the execution would be livestreamed, marking a stark return to one of America's oldest forms of capital punishment. Hasan, a former military psychiatrist, opened fire on unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, killing thirteen people. His case arrives at a moment when American execution practices are undergoing a visible transformation, driven by a cascade of failures in the lethal injection system that has dominated capital punishment for four decades.
The pivot away from lethal injection has accelerated following high-profile botched executions. Christa Pike, convicted of murdering her classmate, survived a failed lethal injection attempt and was discharged from the hospital ten days later. The Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit research organization, documents that fifty-one of the sixty-four botched executions over the past fifty years involved lethal injection—a method introduced in Texas in 1982 and adopted as the default across most states. The failures have prompted officials and state legislatures to resurrect execution methods thought to belong to an earlier era: firing squads, electric chairs, nitrogen gas chambers, and gas chambers. Each carries its own history of error and suffering.
Lethal injection was embraced partly because it appeared, from the outside, to be humane. Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist in Atlanta, calls this "a myth." The drugs can cause pulmonary edema, filling a person's lungs with fluid and producing the sensation of drowning. During Pike's execution, witnesses heard her crying and whimpering throughout the procedure. Medical conditions complicate matters further—Pike suffered from thrombocytosis and other ailments that her lawyers warned would make injection more painful. Beyond individual physiology, systemic failures plague the system. Staff training is often inadequate. Drugs degrade, expire, or sit improperly stored. States experiment with untested drug combinations. Pharmaceutical companies refuse to sell execution drugs, originally developed to save lives, to prisons. The result is a patchwork of improvisation and desperation.
States have begun reaching for alternatives with mixed results. Alabama and Louisiana have carried out executions using nitrogen gas, a method that forces prisoners to breathe pure nitrogen until suffocation. Kenneth Eugene Smith's execution by nitrogen gas in Alabama took twenty-five minutes and involved violent thrashing on the gurney. Since Alabama introduced the method in January 2024, seven people have been executed this way. Dr. Zivot witnessed each one and described them as "a horror show of struggling, of moving, of seizing." Nine states now authorize execution by electric chair, with South Carolina making it the default method. The electric chair has a documented history of catastrophic failure—in 1997, Pedro Medina's head caught fire during his execution in Florida, flames covering his entire head as his attorney watched. Firing squads, too, have proven susceptible to error. Mikahl Mahdi was executed by a three-person firing squad last year, but the bullets missed his heart, striking his liver and other organs instead, prolonging his death. Idaho became the first state to make firing squad its primary execution method after encountering problems with lethal injection. Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah, and South Carolina also authorize it.
The return of these methods coincides with a shift in federal policy. President Trump, a proponent of capital punishment, reinstated the federal death penalty after taking office in 2025, reversing the moratorium imposed during the Biden administration. His executive order framed capital punishment as "an essential tool for deterring and punishing those who would commit the most heinous crimes." Trump has called for expanding the death penalty to cover large-scale drug dealers, human traffickers, and those who kill police officers—categories that have not received capital sentences in the past fifty years, though rape convictions once carried death sentences before that. Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, noted there has been "quite a bit of activity" in state legislatures to approve and reauthorize execution methods since Trump signaled his enthusiasm for capital punishment.
Medical professionals have largely withdrawn from the process. The American Medical Association, representing US doctors, states that physicians are "a profession dedicated to preserving life when there is hope of doing so" and that participating in executions contradicts their oath. National associations for doctors and nurses ban their members from involvement. Yet executions continue, and Maher emphasized a fundamental reality: "We always have the possibility that there's going to be a mistake made when human beings are involved in executions." Every method the US uses can inflict severe pain, especially when something goes wrong. Alonzo Lunsford, a former Army sergeant who survived being shot seven times by Hasan at Fort Hood, told the BBC that firing squad was a "befitting" method because lethal injection and gas chamber would be "doing him a favour." As the military prepares to livestream Hasan's execution, the nation's capital punishment system stands at a crossroads—abandoning the method it adopted to appear more humane, and returning to older techniques whose failures are well documented in the historical record.
Citations marquantes
That was a myth— Dr. Joel Zivot, on the belief that lethal injection is a peaceful execution method
We always have the possibility that there's going to be a mistake made when human beings are involved in executions— Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center
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