Thirty inmates have been executed in the United States this year, with eight more executions on the calendar, most of them in Texas and Florida. Now the Pentagon has handed defenders of capital punishment an unexpected problem: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Thursday that the military will livestream the Dec. 3 firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan. Some of the penalty’s firmest supporters aren’t pleased.
A Rift on the Right
The pushback came fast. Much of it came from Republicans. Vice President JD Vance questioned Friday whether the execution would happen at all and said he wouldn’t watch. Retiring North Carolina Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis called a livestream “beyond disgusting.” Idaho state Rep. Bruce Skaug, a Republican and retired attorney who wrote his state’s law making the firing squad its primary execution method, said the announcement caught him off guard. “That’s a difficult one for me to swallow,” he said.
Skaug’s own view is instructive. He believes executions should be rare, but when a court imposes the punishment, it’s the government’s duty to “carry it out properly.” Idaho adopted the firing squad because it sees death as quicker and botched executions as less likely.
Questions of Administration
The debate over how the state carries out its gravest power sharpened after what happened in Tennessee. Christa Pike survived an attempted execution on Oct. 1, a botched lethal injection. She received a death sentence in 1996, 30 years ago, for murdering a classmate. Her case has since prompted fresh calls for abolition. Tennessee’s Republican legislators haven’t backed away from the penalty, though. They’ve considered returning to the electric chair or allowing firing squads.
The family of Colleen Slemmer, the victim Pike was convicted of killing, supports her execution.
The numbers show a country that’s wary but hasn’t turned its back. A Pew Research Center poll conducted in July found about two-thirds of U.S. adults consider the death penalty morally justified for people convicted of murder. About 6 in 10 said it doesn’t deter crime, and about 7 in 10 said there’s some risk an innocent person could be executed. Gallup’s trend shows support has fallen considerably since the 1990s. When Pike received her sentence, 37 states had capital punishment. Since then, 10 states have abolished it, and executions haven’t returned to their late-1990s peak.
Accountability and the Public Gaze
Brenner Fissell, vice president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said public executions “are seen by most civilized societies as grotesque and barbaric.” Yet he knew of no legal obstacle barring the administration from livestreaming Hasan’s execution. “You don’t have a right to a secret death,” he said.
Robert Blecker, a professor emeritus at New York Law School, offered a different angle. Public executions, he said, could make the government accept responsibility for what it does. “Shouldn’t the people have access to what’s being done in their name?” he said. “If we can’t stomach and can’t tolerate it, then abolish it.” Blecker considers the penalty morally appropriate in a few cases involving the worst criminals, a view he traces to ancient Hebrew and Greek thought, which held that failing to punish criminals adequately polluted the population as a whole.
Public executions were common in the United States from the Revolution into the 20th century. None has taken place since the late 1930s.
Faith and Family Divided
Religious institutions split along familiar lines. The Southern Baptist Convention and the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod support the death penalty, citing Biblical passages on retributive justice and the authority God granted to punish grave crimes. Supporters in those traditions see it as necessary to uphold moral order and as a just response to the taking of innocent life. Hegseth’s own church and denomination were co-founded by archconservative pastor Doug Wilson, who supports capital punishment.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and several mainline Protestant denominations oppose it, citing redemption and the “sanctity of life.” Archbishop Paul S. Coakley, the conference’s president, called the livestream plan “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death” that “must be reconsidered.”
Victims’ families don’t agree with each other either. Rachel Sutphin, a Presbyterian pastor whose father was killed while serving as a sheriff’s deputy, opposes the penalty. The man convicted of killing him was the last person Virginia executed, in 2017. Sutphin joined the coalition that helped abolish capital punishment in Virginia in 2021. She said the Pentagon’s announcement was shocking enough that it might draw her back into advocacy. “This place where (in) the name of revenge, taking an eye for an eye, has become socially acceptable and has almost become a form of entertainment -- that very much concerns me,” she said.
Why This Matters:
The fight over Hasan’s execution isn’t really about one man. It’s about whether government can exercise its most serious power competently, soberly and with restraint. Supporters like Skaug argue that if the state imposes a sentence, it owes the public and the condemned a process that works. A botched injection in Tennessee and a proposed livestream in Washington both raise doubts about that. For those who view capital punishment as a legitimate, narrowly applied tool of justice, the stakes include keeping public confidence. Polls already show most Americans worry about wrongful executions. Spectacle and error give abolitionists their strongest arguments, and they hand them to the other side for free.