The Pentagon is preparing to carry out the first U.S. military execution in more than six decades, with convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan set to face an Army firing squad after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recommended the punishment and President Donald J. Trump approved it.
Hasan who was a Army major and psychiatris, opened fire on Nov. 5, 2009, inside the Soldier Readiness Processing center at Fort Hood, where soldiers were preparing for deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. That attack killed 13 people and wounded 31 others.
As soldiers fled the building, Hasan pursued them outside, where a civilian nurse called 911 from her cellphone. Military police soon arrived and confronted Hasan, who exchanged gunfire with a civilian police officer before being shot in the chest and disabled.
Fort Hood has since been renamed Fort Cavazos.
Richard Sean Parnell, assistant to the Secretary of Defense, announced the decision in a post on X.
“The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution. Judgement day for Hasan has finally come,” Parnell said?
Although the announcement was made, the department has not pinpointed the actual time, date or place of the execution.
Army procedures provide that an execution occur within 150 days of presidential approval but not sooner than 60 days. That window defines when Hasan’s execution could be scheduled.
A general court-martial convicted Hasan in 2013 of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder and sentenced him to death. The sentence has since survived military appellate review.
The Army had already been developing a framework for carrying out military executions before this new Trump approval came through.
An internal February plan identified as Operation Resolute Justice contemplates moving condemned military prisoners from the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to the federal execution facility in Terre Haute, Indiana, in coordination with the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
That facility has seen several Justice Department non-military federal executions during Trump’s first term. Army regulation mandates at least two media outlets selected to witness those executions.
U.S Army spokesperson Cynthia Smith confirmed that the service conducts regular contingency exercises for military executions. At the time of those reports, the Army said it had not received a specific presidential execution order.
The last U.S. service member executed under military justice was Army Pvt. John Arthur Bennett, who was hanged at Fort Leavenworth on April 13, 1961.
Bennett had been serving in occupied Austria when, while heavily intoxicated, he left his base near Salzburg in search of a brothel and encountered an 11-year-old Austrian girl whom he then raped and attempted to murder.
He was convicted by a court-martial of rape and attempted murder and sentenced to death. President Dwight D. Eisenhower approved the sentence in 1957, and Army Secretary Elvis J. Stahr Jr. ordered it carried out in February 1961.
Although the victim’s family sought his pardon, Bennett still was executed at 25.
Hasan’s case is now the first to move from that planning framework to presidential approval, with timing and location to be set by the Secretary of the Army.
