Nidal Hasan, charged with killing 13 people and wounding 32 in a November 2009 shooting spree at Fort Hood, is pictured in an undated handout photo obtained by Reuters on June 29, 2012. In an Oct. 8, 2026 interview, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon planned to livestream the execution of Hasan by firing squad in December; Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, denounced the plan as \u201cbarbaric\u201d in an Oct. 9 statement. (OSV News photo\/Bell County Sheriff\u2019s Office via Reuters)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nTheologian and bioethicist Charles Camosy, associate professor at The Catholic University of America, said the planned livestreaming of the execution recalls \u201cdays gone by we\u2019ve only seen in movies \u2014 the public executions that were attended broadly by the people.\u201d<\/p>\n
The last two public executions took place in the U.S. in 1936 and 1937. In 1936, nearly 20,000 people gathered to watch the hanging of Rainey Bethea in Owensboro, Kentucky, for rape and murder. State lawmakers in the U.S. were shocked by reports of the execution\u2019s carnival atmosphere and moved to ban public executions. The last public execution took place the following year, with 500 people in attendance, in rural Stone County, Missouri.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought that was of a time that we had left,\u201d but \u201cit\u2019s back with us now,\u201d said Camosy.<\/p>\n
He lamented the \u201ccheapness of human life\u201d and \u201cthe failure of a pro-life movement that says all human life, regardless of circumstances, is valuable and dignified, and ought not to be subjected to this kind of spectacle.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ken Butigan, co-director of the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence and a retired professor of the practice in peace, justice, and conflict studies at DePaul University, pointed to updated Church teaching on the death penalty.<\/p>\n
Pope Francis revised the Catechism of the Catholic Church in 2018 to clarify the Church\u2019s teaching that capital punishment is morally \u201cinadmissible\u201d in the modern world \u201cbecause it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.\u201d<\/p>\n
The late pope relied upon the teaching of St. John Paul II, who in the 1995 encyclical \u201cEvangelium Vitae\u201d (\u201cThe Gospel of Life\u201d) addressed capital punishment. He found the case of authorities having to resort to the death penalty \u201cwhen it would not be possible otherwise to defend society\u201d were so rare as to be \u201cpractically non-existent\u201d due to the modern penal system.<\/p>\n
The saint restated the controlling moral principle from the Catechism: \u201cIf bloodless means are sufficient to defend human lives against an aggressor and to protect public order and the safety of persons, public authority must limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.\u201d<\/p>\n
The teaching on the death penalty being morally \u201cinadmissible\u201d in the modern world was reiterated by Pope Leo XIV in an Oct. 10 X post for the World Day Against the Death Penalty.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe we\u2019re at a crossroads, and we can choose a new direction beyond violence,\u201d said Butigan. \u201cOne way we can do that is to refuse to cooperate with this execution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Annie Phoenix, executive director of the Jesuit Social Research Institute at Loyola University New Orleans, noted that \u201cthe precondition of doing violence to any person or group of people is dehumanization.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we dehumanize others in order to do violence to them,\u201d she said. \u201cIn order to watch and to encourage other people to watch violence, we have to dehumanize the people that we\u2019re enacting violence upon.\u201d<\/p>\n
Phoenix said students in her courses, many of which focus on violence in the history of the United States, have drawn \u201cconnections to lynching\u201d with regard to the planned livestreamed execution of Hasan.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously it\u2019s not a one-to-one connection in terms of race,\u201d she explained. \u201cBut the fact that we would, as a country, have a government condone a public killing and ask for people to watch it really hearkens back to a very disturbing part of our history as a nation, and it\u2019s something that should give everyone great concern. Healthy democracies don\u2019t kill people in the public square.\u201d<\/p>\n
And, she said, \u201cI think it\u2019s doing damage to our souls. We are not meant to watch the killing, the maiming, the hurting of other people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her students, most of whom are 18 years old, \u201care struggling to understand why, frankly, the adults in the room are acting this way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mary Graw Leary, a former federal prosecutor and now professor at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law, raised questions as to the legality \u2014 as well as the efficacy \u2014 of the planned livestreaming.<\/p>\n
\u201cI find it very troubling that the military would consider doing this,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Leary also said that \u201cthere\u2019s pretty strong evidence that the severity of punishment is much less a deterrent to crime than other factors, including the surety of punishment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of the \u201cfour main theories of punishment\u201d \u2014 specific deterrence, general deterrence, physical incapacitation of an offender, and retribution \u2014 \u201cnone of them appear to be served by this.\u201d<\/p>\n
Other legal experts have also cast doubt on the legal viability of the livestreamed execution in terms of both military law and federal law as a whole.<\/p>\n
Daniel Maurer \u2014 a retired Army lieutenant colonel and now an associate professor at Ohio Northern University\u2019s Pettit College of Law \u2014 concluded in an Oct. 11 analysis for Georgetown Law\u2019s Center on National Security that the broadcast would likely violate the Eighth Amendment\u2019s prohibition of \u201ccruel and unusual punishment.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know \u2014 and the Department of Justice has lots of literature on this \u2014 that exposure to violence is traumatic,\u201d Leary said. \u201cSo the only thing that the Pentagon would be doing is exposing people to trauma.\u201d<\/p>\n
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