New York, Oct 9 — US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has announced that a convicted terrorist would be executed publicly through livestreaming when he is killed by a firing squad, sparking controversy over making it a public spectacle.
“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public,” he said of the execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who was convicted in the terrorist killing of 13 people at a military base in 2009.
The Pentagon said on Thursday that the execution would be livestreamed.
This would be the first public execution in the US in about a century, returning to a practice now found only in repressive regimes such as those in Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea, as well as the terror group Islamic State when it controlled territories before its rout.
Even Saudi Arabia, which used to make a public spectacle of beheadings, has discontinued the practice of conducting them openly.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres' Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric criticised the planned public display on Friday, describing it as “abhorrent”.
“A government executing someone in public or in front of live cameras, frankly, is abhorrent,” he said.
The move was also criticised by leaders of President Donald Trump's own party as unbecoming of the US.
Republican Senator Thom Tillis called the plan “beyond disgusting”, pointing out that “public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do”.
Austin Scott, a senior Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee, said: “Live-streaming executions is what jihadists do.”
“America is better than that,” he added, while also saying that he supported the death penalty.
Hasan's conviction was by court-martial, as he was an Army major. If he is executed, it would be the first military execution since 1961 and the first public execution in the US since World War II.
He did not contest his conviction, readily conceding that he carried out the shooting, which also wounded 32 people, as a “mujahideen”.
He had also sent a communication to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the late self-proclaimed “Caliph” of the Islamic State.
Except for federal and military cases, the death penalty falls under state laws, with some states carrying out large numbers of executions, while 23 of the 50 states have abolished it.
The methods of execution also vary, with some states allowing the electric chair, firing squads, or lethal injections.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 47 people were executed in 11 states last year.
The death penalty has raised questions in the US after Tennessee state's attempt to execute a woman reportedly failed when two lethal injections did not kill her this week, and she is now in the hospital.
The case of Linda Pike, who survived the execution attempt, is unusual because she was sentenced in 1995 for the murder of an acquaintance when she was 18 years old and had been on death row for more than 30 years.
The man who carried out the murder with her was spared the death penalty because he was under 18 years old.