Seventeen Years After Fort Hood, a Firing Squad Is Readied for Nidal Hasan

The announcement came in the manner of our age: a post on the platform X, late on a Monday. “Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended — and President Donald J. Trump has approved — death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan, the jihadist who opened fire on unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009,” the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, wrote. He added: “Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.” Hegseth reposted the message with a single word: “Justice.”

So it was that, seventeen years after the shooting, and thirteen years after the sentence, the machinery of a military execution — a thing the United States armed forces have not operated since 1961 — was set in motion. The Secretary of the Army, Parnell said, will set the time and the place. CBS News reported it has sought comment from Hasan’s attorney; CNBC said the White House did not immediately answer its questions.

The readiness center, November 5, 2009

Hasan was an Army major and a psychiatrist, born in northern Virginia, weeks from deployment to Afghanistan, when he walked into a readiness processing center at Fort Hood, outside Killeen, Texas, and opened fire with a semi-automatic, laser-sighted handgun. He killed 13 people — 12 active-duty but unarmed soldiers and a retired serviceman, according to the Independent, among them a pregnant soldier — and wounded 32 more. Parnell said he shouted “Allahu Akbar” as he fired. Military police shot him during his arrest, leaving him partially paralysed and in a wheelchair.

Former Staff Sgt. Patrick Zeigler, a two-time combat veteran, was hit four times and spent nearly a year moving between hospitals. “He looked me straight in the eyes as he pointed the gun at me, and a split second later, I’m on the floor with a hole in my head,” Zeigler told the Killeen Daily Herald in 2023.

A defendant who defended the Taliban

At his 2013 court-martial Hasan, now 56, dismissed his lawyers and represented himself — and then quarrelled with the court-appointed standby attorneys, who came to fear he was seeking the death penalty he now faces. “The evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter,” he told the jury in his opening statement, and it would show “that we are imperfect Muslims trying to establish the perfect religion … I apologize for any mistakes I made in this endeavor.”

He looked me straight in the eyes as he pointed the gun at me, and a split second later, I’m on the floor with a hole in my head.

Midway through the proceedings he asked for a delay to prepare a “defense of others” strategy. The presiding judge, Col. Tara Osborn, asked whom he had been defending. “The leadership of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the Taliban,” Hasan replied. Prosecutors argued his true motives were a refusal to deploy to Afghanistan and a wish to retaliate for America’s wars in the Muslim world. In August 2013 a military jury convicted him — the Independent puts the count at 45 counts of premeditated murder — and recommended death. He was sent to the death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, one, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, of only four men condemned by U.S. military courts-martial.

The long corridor of appeals

In America, a military death sentence is one of the rarest objects in the legal warehouse: it requires appellate review and, by federal law, the president’s own signature before any sentence may be carried out. Hasan petitioned the Supreme Court in 2024, arguing the trial judge had violated his right to a public trial by clearing the courtroom before taking up issues with the attorneys. On March 31, 2025, the justices declined to hear him. In September 2025 Hegseth said he had asked Trump to approve the execution. “I am 100 percent committed to ensuring the death penalty is carried out for Nidal Hasan,” he told The Hill. “This savage terrorist deserves the harshest lawful punishment for his 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood. The victims and survivors deserve justice without delays.”

The musket, the rope, the volley

If the volley is fired, it will be the first military execution of any kind since 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth for raping and attempting to kill a young girl in Austria. The last U.S. Army firing squad did its work earlier still, according to Military Times: on January 31, 1945, when Pvt. Eddie D. Slovik, the deserter, was shot in France. The Death Penalty Information Center believes the last-known military execution by firing squad was likely carried out “by musketry” in November 1945.

The method has lately crept back into American use. South Carolina carried out three firing-squad executions last year — the nation’s first since 2010 — beginning with Brad Sigmon, 67, condemned in 2002 for killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents, who chose the bullets over the state’s electric chair and lethal injection; Mikal Mahdi followed on April 11. The state’s supreme court had ruled in 2024 that the firing squad was lawful because a prisoner would not suffer longer than 15 seconds. At least six people have been executed this way since the U.S. reinstated capital punishment in 1977. The Associated Press counts at least 145 civilian prisoners executed by shooting since 1608, nearly all of them in Utah — The Hill’s report puts the figure at 144. At least five states keep firing squads in their statute books, though Utah’s supreme court halted the firing-squad execution of Ralph Menzies scheduled for September 5, 2025.

The federal government has also widened its arsenal. Trump, who restored the federal death penalty on his first day back in office in January 2025, has seen his Justice Department direct officials to consider firing squads, electrocution and lethal gas alongside lethal injection — in part, the Independent reported, because the drugs for injections have grown hard to obtain and unreliable to use. That unreliability was on display in Tennessee only last week, where prison staff botched the lethal injection of Christa Pike and left her alive but unconscious on life support; the state has since suspended executions pending an inquiry. Pike’s lawyers had begged the corrections department to consider hanging or the firing squad instead, foreseeing the trouble with her veins.

The power to kill

An execution, when a state undertakes it, is always also a message about the state — about what it reserves for itself and what it forbids everyone else. The anti-death-penalty campaign group Death Penalty Action heard in Monday’s announcement a colder calculation. “There’s nothing Donald Trump loves more than the power to kill,” the group said, noting that Trump oversaw more executions in his first term than any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. “Truly, this is just another distraction and a ploy to stem his record-low approval ratings.”

Somewhere in Fort Leavenworth’s death row a man of 56 waits in a wheelchair, a psychiatrist who once told a jury exactly what he had done and why. The Secretary of the Army will now choose the day, the hour and the ground. After seventeen years of briefs and hearings, the final paperwork has been reduced, by the technology of the moment, to a hundred words on a social platform: judgement day has finally come.