Donald Trump has approved a firing squad execution for Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people and wounded 32 others in the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas. If it goes forward, it will be the first time the U.S. military has put one of its own to death since 1961.
Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced the decision on X, saying Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended death by U.S. Army firing squad and Trump approved it. Parnell called Hasan a jihadist and wrote, “Judgment day for Hasan has finally come.” Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle will set the time and place.
On November 5, 2009, Hasan, then an Army major, walked into a processing center at Fort Hood where soldiers were preparing to deploy and opened fire on unarmed troops. It remains the deadliest attack ever carried out on an American military base. A military jury convicted him in 2013 and sentenced him to death. He has been held ever since at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, home of the military’s only death row.
Trump had to weigh in because service members are tried under a separate legal system called the Uniform Code of Military Justice. When a court-martial, the military’s version of a criminal trial, hands down a death sentence, the sentence cannot be carried out until the sitting president personally approves it. Once that happens, the law calls for the execution to take place within 60 to 150 days.
That clock may not hold. Hasan can still file a habeas corpus petition in civilian federal court. Habeas corpus is a legal challenge arguing that someone is being held or punished unlawfully, and an article published in May in the magazine Army Lawyer noted it could put the process on hold for years. It has happened before. In 2008, President George W. Bush approved the execution of Ronald Gray, a former soldier convicted of two murders and three rapes near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Gray was scheduled to die by lethal injection that December, but a federal judge stopped it, and he is still on death row.
Gray is one of four men on military death row, along with Hasan, Hasan Akbar and Timothy Hennis. Earlier this year, the Army drew up an internal plan called “Operation Resolute Justice” covering potential executions for all four. Hasan is the first name to reach Trump’s desk.
The last military execution carries its own history. On April 13, 1961, Army Pvt. John A. Bennett, a Black soldier from a Virginia sharecropping family, was hanged at Fort Leavenworth for raping and attempting to kill an 11-year-old girl in Austria. President Eisenhower signed his death warrant. Days before the hanging, the girl and her parents wrote to President Kennedy asking him to spare Bennett’s life. Kennedy let the warrant stand. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Richard A. Serrano later documented that during those years at Leavenworth, eight Black soldiers were hanged while eight white soldiers on the same death row were spared. Two of the four men on military death row today, Gray and Akbar, are Black.
The firing squad choice fits a wider push by the Trump administration. In April, the Justice Department authorized firing squads for federal executions and brought back pentobarbital, the single drug lethal injection used for 13 federal executions during Trump’s first term. Only five states currently allow a firing squad execution: Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah. Before 2025, the country had seen just three in modern times, all in Utah. South Carolina then carried out three last year, putting Brad Sigmon to death in March, Mikal Mahdi in April and Stephen Bryant in November.
Lethal injection has had its own failures. Asked recently about a botched execution in Tennessee, Trump called it “an interesting situation” and said, “It shouldn’t be very difficult.”
For the families of the 13 people Hasan killed, the wait has now stretched almost 17 years. Whether the firing squad execution happens within months or gets tied up for years depends on whether Hasan files that federal appeal and how quickly the courts move on it.
