Trump Approves Firing-Squad Execution of Fort Hood Shooter Nidal Hasan

WASHINGTON — The announcement came Monday night, and it arrived in the kind of blunt language the Pentagon almost never uses. Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell posted on X that President Donald Trump had approved the military execution of former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan — by firing squad — and that he did so at the recommendation of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. “Judgement day has finally come,” Parnell wrote.

Hegseth replied to Parnell’s post with a single word: “Justice.”

Parnell’s announcement pulled no punches about what Hasan was convicted of doing. “He killed 13 people and wounded 32 others while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ during the attack,” Parnell wrote, in comments reported by CNN.

The decision was announced on the evening of Monday, October 5 — not at a Pentagon press briefing, but in a post on X from the department’s chief spokesperson. Parnell said the approval came at the recommendation of Hegseth, placing the War Department squarely behind a punishment the military has not carried out in generations.

What happens next is less certain than the announcement made it sound. Secretary of the Army Adam Telle will set the time and place of the execution, and no date has been announced. And despite the finality of the word “approved,” the execution is not imminent. USA Today notes that Army Lawyer magazine reported in May that presidential approval begins a potentially lengthy post-appellate court process — meaning Hasan may still pursue legal challenges, and years of proceedings could still stand between the president’s decision and a firing squad. USA Today cautioned that despite the announcement’s finality, the execution is not imminent.

If it does happen, it will be history. Hasan’s would be the first firing-squad execution of a U.S. soldier since World War II, and the first imposition of any military death penalty in 65 years. The last U.S. military execution was in 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was hanged at a Kansas prison for the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old girl, according to Death Penalty Information Center data cited by USA Today. The military death chamber has been silent for the entire lives of almost everyone wearing a uniform today.

That process is the military justice system’s final gauntlet. The death sentence was handed down in 2013, unanimously, by a panel of 13 officers, and the case has been working through military appellate courts ever since. Army Lawyer magazine reported this spring that even presidential approval only begins the next chapter: a potentially lengthy post-appellate review, during which Hasan may still pursue legal challenges. The signature is real. The timeline is not.

The road to this announcement has been long. Hasan was an Army major and a psychiatrist when, on November 5, 2009, he opened fire inside Fort Hood’s Soldier Readiness Processing Center, where troops were undergoing final medical checks before deploying. He admitted in court that he was the gunman, and apologized for what he called “any mistakes.” A panel of 13 officers convicted him in July 2013 of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder, and handed down a unanimous death sentence. Hasan has said his actions were linked to his opposition to U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan; prosecutors presented evidence that he had communicated online with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical cleric who was later killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen.

The timing of the announcement is hard to miss. It came less than a week after the botched September 30 execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee, where two doses of pentobarbital failed to kill her and she was left hospitalized in critical condition. Previously reported on the Pike execution and its fallout — a failure that has forced a reckoning over lethal injection itself. Some states, facing the same drug shortages and reliability questions, have turned to firing squads instead. The Pike failure has focused national attention on whether lethal injection can be carried out reliably at all, a point Columbia Law School’s Bernard Harcourt made in USA Today’s coverage.

That debate now sits alongside the military’s own. Firing squads are legal in the military justice system, and this approval puts the method back on the national stage in the starkest way possible: not a state quietly changing its protocol, but the President of the United States signing off on one.

There is still no date. There is still, potentially, a long legal road ahead — the post-appellate process the Army’s own lawyers warned about in May. But nearly seventeen years after the shooting at Fort Hood, the federal government has put its signature on the paper. What happens next belongs to the courts, to Secretary Telle’s scheduling authority, and to a military justice system that has not carried out a death sentence since the year John F. Kennedy took office.