By Jonathan J. Cooper
President Donald Trump has approved the execution by firing squad of Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan for the 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas.
The U.S. military has not carried out the death penalty since 1961. The Army secretary will decide a time and place for the execution, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell wrote in a post on X.
“Judgement day for Hasan has finally come,” Parnell wrote.
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Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, walked into a medical building where soldiers were getting medical checkups, shouted “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — and opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun. Thirteen people were killed and more than 30 injured.
He said it was an effort to stop them from going to Afghanistan and killing his fellow Muslims and made almost no effort to defend himself at trial. He told jurors that evidence would show he was the shooter and described himself as a soldier who had “switched sides.”
Trump’s approval triggers a series of procedural steps toward carrying out the execution, but Hasan could put them on hold — potentially for years — with a habeas corpus appeal in the civilian federal court system, according to an article published in May in the magazine Army Lawyer.
Death sentences are extremely rare in the military justice system, and executions even rarer. Four men, including Hasan, are currently on the military’s death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. President George W. Bush approved the execution Army Spc. Ronald Gray in 2008 but it was put on hold by a judge and he remains at Leavenworth.
The last man executed in the military system was Pvt. John Bennett, hanged in 1961 for raping an 11-year-old girl.
Trump approved the firing squad execution days after a failed attempt to execute Christa Pike by lethal injection pushed Tennessee’s governor to halt further executions this year and order an independent review.
Trump resumed the federal death penalty after an informal moratorium during previous administrations. The federal government executed 13 people between 2020 and early 2021, contributing to making Trump the most prolific execution president in over 130 years.
Asked whether the botched execution in Tennessee would lead him to seek changes to capital punishment, Trump said it was “an interesting situation.”
“It shouldn’t be very difficult,” Trump said of carrying out lethal injections.
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