Trump approves firing squad execution for Fort Hood shooter

President Donald Trump has approved the execution by firing squad of Nidal Malik Hasan, a former U.S. Army psychiatrist who opened fire on dozens of people at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.

Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s spokesman, said Monday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had recommended death by Army firing squad and that Trump approved it.

“Judgement day for Hasan has finally come,” Parnell said on X.

The secretary of the Army will decide the time and place of the execution, Parnell added.

If carried out, it would mark the first U.S. military execution since April 13, 1961, when Army Pvt. John A. Bennett was hanged after being convicted of rape and attempted murder, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, which monitors capital punishment. The military’s last known firing squad execution was carried out by “musketry” on Nov. 9, 1945, according to the group.

Hasan, an American-born Muslim, killed 13 people and injured 32 others when he opened fire at Fort Hood’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center, where troops were preparing to deploy to Afghanistan. He shouted “Allahu akbar!” meaning “God is great,” before targeting soldiers with a handgun he had fitted with laser sights.

Hasan, who acted as his own attorney, was convicted of premeditated murder and sentenced to death in 2013. During his court-martial, he admitted responsibility for the shooting, saying he had been on the wrong side of a war against Islam and had switched over.

Hasan was scheduled to go to Afghanistan at the end of November 2009 but did not want to deploy, the court heard.

Execution by firing squad is rare in the United States, permitted in a handful of states: Idaho, Oklahoma, Utah, South Carolina and Mississippi. Three people in South Carolina were put to death using the method last year, Death Penalty Information Center data shows. Before then, only three people had been executed in this manner since 1977 - all in Utah.

Trump has long been a staunch supporter of capital punishment. During his first term in 2020, the Justice Department carried out its first federal executions in nearly two decades. In his second term, his administration lifted a moratorium on federal executions and pushed for more death sentences.

In April, the Justice Department said it would move to expand execution methods used to carry out federal death sentences beyond lethal injection, including by making the electric chair and firing squads available in some cases. It also directed federal officials to restore the execution protocol from Trump’s first term, which uses the drug pentobarbital for lethal injections.

Trump’s approval of Hasan’s execution by firing squad comes days after Tennessee authorities made a botched attempt to execute Christa Pike, who was sentenced to death for her role in a brutal 1995 murder, by lethal injection.

Pike was hospitalized after she was given two doses of pentobarbital but continued to breathe for nearly an hour, court filings by her legal team stated. Her attorney said Sunday she remains in critical condition.