On the afternoon of Dec. 3, a U.S. Army firing squad is scheduled to execute Nidal Hasan, the former military psychiatrist who murdered 13 people and wounded 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009. The Pentagon confirmed last weekthat a live-stream will be provided for anyone who wants to watch.
"We'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public," Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in announcing the live-stream, "because people need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types of things."
The planned broadcast of the execution would be the first known live broadcast of a lawful American execution, and the first public execution in the United States in nearly 90 years. The announcement drew criticism and support from around the nation, including here in Utah.
Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson called the planned broadcast "deeply disturbing." Gov. Spencer Cox reposted author Tim Carney's judgment that "televising the execution is barbaric." Sen. John Curtis, invoking Seneca's warning that ancient Rome's bloody spectacles corrupted the people who watched them, urged Hegseth to reconsider: "Broadcasting a death diminishes us and is not an effective deterrent."
The objectors may yet get their way. At the time of this publishing, national media sources claim that administration officials are divided over whether to go through with the livestream, and that President Donald Trump has yet to make a final decision.
Inside the White House, as in Utah, the argument is over the show, not the death sentence.
That distinction revives the question this country has not seriously debated since the 1930s: if the state kills in the public's name, should the public see it?
Why America Stopped Showing Public Executions
Executions were designed for public viewing for much of the country's first two centuries. Hanging days were civic rituals involving sermons, scaffold, and final confession of the convicted. They were meant to display the government fulfilling its duty and to warn other would-be criminals of the serious consequences.
But the transformation of these solemn acts of justice into spectacles of diversion caused many to think twice.
One of the earliest voices against public executions came from Italy. In 1764, reformer Cesare Beccaria argued that public executions served chiefly as "entertainment for the majority," and hardened spectators rather than deterring them.
Two and a half centuries on, modern criminology backs him up: the National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department's own research arm, reports that "the certainty of being caught is a vastly more powerful deterrent than the punishment," and that "there is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals."
American lawmakers eventually agreed, and not only on moral grounds.
Historians of the first private-execution laws, notably Louis Masur in Rites of Execution and John Bessler in Death in the Dark, find that legislators in the 1830s also feared the gallows crowd was breeding sympathy for the condemned and converts to abolition of the death penalty itself. Moving the hanging behind jail house walls took away the anti-death-penalty movement's most powerful exhibit. As Bessler puts it, private-execution laws "shielded Americans from the reality of the death penalty."
To preserve the power to put criminals to death, states started passing laws to ban the public display of executions. Pennsylvania moved hangings behind jail walls in 1834; New York mandated private executions in 1835. But this new privacy was leaky as law enforcement continued to believe in the deterrent effect of public executions. Sheriffs deputized hundreds of "witnesses," as a loophole around the laws in order for the public to see the executions. And in 1928 a reporter with a camera strapped to his ankle photographed Ruth Snyder dying in Sing Sing's electric chair beneath a front page that read, simply, "DEAD!"
The end of public executions came in Owensboro, Kentucky, on Aug. 14, 1936, when Rainey Bethea, a Black man convicted of raping an elderly white woman, was hanged before a crowd estimated at 20,000.
The national press called it a carnival, and the embarrassed state legislature repealed Kentucky's public hanging law in 1938. After one last semi-public hanging in Missouri in 1937, no American execution has been carried out in public since.
The Case for Watching
Hegseth's argument in support of public executions is the oldest one: consequences seen are consequences feared.
Supporters of the livestream contend that a society facing political assassinations and mass shootings should make the price of such crimes unmistakable. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah drew that conclusion in a January online comment, after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last September, posting on X two lines about the man charged with killing him: "Execute Tyler Robinson." And: "In public."
Another compelling argument for public executions comes from the other side of the death-penalty debate: transparency.
Austin Sarat, an Amherst College scholar of capital punishment and no friend of the death penalty, argues that executions are inherently public acts. Hiding them, he wrote cynically, "helps keep the machinery of capital punishment running."
In 1991, San Francisco's public television station KQED sued for the right to film an execution at San Quentin on just those grounds: the public cannot judge what it is forbidden to see.
Political philosophers .make a deeper version of the argument, and it begins with who the executioner works for. In medieval and early-modern England, crimes were offenses against the King's peace, and the condemned died in the King's name. The gallows were a public display of royal sovereignty over life and death. The American founding relocated that sovereign authority.
As Yale legal philosopher Paul W. Kahn puts it in "Sacred Violence," "the subject, or bearer, of sovereignty in the West has moved from God to monarch to the people."
An American execution is therefore carried out in the name of a sovereign numbering in the millions. On this logic, the people are not spectators at the event; they are the authority in whose name it happens, and an authority is entitled to see what is done on its orders.
Fordham law professor Deborah Denno made the same point about the Hasan broadcast, saying a livestream could make the process "much more transparent" and leave the public "fully aware that it's happening."
On this view, private executions are the real scandal, a moral outsourcing by which citizens authorize killing while delegating the sight of it to a handful of witnesses behind prison glass.
A democracy willing to impose death, the argument runs, should be willing to look at it.
The Case Against
America ran the deterrence experiment for three centuries, and scholars who study the era say public executions were abandoned precisely because officials stopped believing they deterred anyone, and began fearing that gruesome or botched spectacles would turn the public against the punishment itself.
There is also the question of what a spectacle does to the state that stages it.
Elisabeth Semel of Berkeley's Death Penalty Clinic asks what government purpose an execution-as-event serves, and at what cost to the dignity of everyone involved. Robin Maher of the Death Penalty Information Center notes that public executions today are the signature of authoritarian states seeking to instill fear.
Amnesty International's recent counts find them almost exclusively in Iran and Taliban-run Afghanistan, the company North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis had in mind when he wrote online that "public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do."
No state knows firing squads better than Utah, which shot Gary Gilmore in 1977 and Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010 and keeps the method in law as a backup. Yet even here, the objection from many elected leaders is to the camera, not the death sentence.
This is the same line of logic 20th century Kentucky lawmakers drew after Owensboro.
But the 1936 crowd, at least, went home where the images largely only lived in memory. A livestream of an execution in 2026 will keep the images alive and discoverable in public memory, further becoming video clips to be shared and possibly recruiting propaganda.
Hasan and his fellow radical Islamists will likely embrace the public attention. Attention is, after all, a large reason why mass murderers and terrorists commit their heinous crimes.
America has juggled this tradeoff before. When the 2001 execution of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh raised the similar questions, Attorney General John Ashcroft confined the broadcast to a closed-circuit feed for survivors and victims' families and warned reporters becoming "Timothy McVeigh's co-conspirators": "I do not want anyone to be able to purchase access to the podium of America with the blood of 168 innocent victims.”
An Unfinished Choice for Everyone
After reviewing the most prominent arguments of either side of this debate, one observation is clear that the opposing sides agree on more than they readily admit. Both believe that visibility changes the death penalty. They merely differ on whether the sight would sober the country or harden it.
For every American the question remains: if the government kills in the public’s name, is looking away a form of moral evasion or is the refusal to make death a show precisely the restraint that separates justice from vengeance?
For nearly 90 years, Americans answered this question by closing the door to public executions. On Dec. 3, by watching or declining to, the country may begin to decide whether to open it again.
What are we missing? What did this piece get wrong? Email me at joshua@utahn.com.
AI tools were used in the production of this article. Utahn uses AI to read documents, assemble data, and conduct deep research. Every piece is reported, written, and edited by a Utahn journalist. Read more about how we use AI.
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