President Donald Trump has approved a Pentagon recommendation to execute Nidal Hasan, the former Army major who killed 13 soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009, by firing squad — a method that would make his death the US military's first execution by that means since the end of World War Two.
Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell announced the decision Monday on social media, saying Secretary of War Pete Hegseth had recommended the firing squad and that the president had signed off. Parnell said the secretary of the Army would now set the time and place of the execution.
Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.
— Sean Parnell, chief Pentagon spokesperson, on X
Hasan, an Army psychiatrist from Virginia, opened fire inside a crowded medical building at the Texas base on November 5, 2009, as soldiers awaited deployment check-ups and vaccinations, killing 13 people and wounding 32 others in what remains the deadliest non-combat attack ever carried out on an American military installation. At his 2013 court-martial, Hasan admitted he was the gunman, apologized for "any mistakes" and said he believed he was protecting Muslims and the Taliban in Afghanistan. A panel of 13 officers unanimously sentenced him to death.
A rare method, a long-delayed sentence
Hasan has sat on the military's death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, as one of four condemned inmates, since his conviction, as a string of appeals ran their course. His final legal challenge was rejected in 2025, clearing the way for execution — but any military death sentence still requires a sitting president's approval, a safeguard rooted in the fact that the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces found the military death penalty unconstitutional in 1983 before it was reinstated the next year by executive order under President Ronald Reagan. The US military has not put a service member to death since 1961.
Death by firing squad is itself unusual in the American justice system. The method was used in the US for the first time in 15 years last year, in South Carolina, and remains legally available in only four other states — Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah — alongside lethal injection and, in some jurisdictions, the electric chair. Trump reinstated the federal death penalty by executive order on his first day back in office in January 2025, reversing a moratorium imposed by the Biden administration's Justice Department, and has since described capital punishment as "an essential tool for deterring and punishing those who would commit the most heinous crimes and acts of lethal violence against American citizens."
No execution date has yet been set. Survivors and families of those killed at Fort Hood have pressed for years for the sentence to be carried out, and Hegseth has previously said he was "100 percent committed to ensuring the death penalty is carried out for Nidal Hasan," calling him a "savage terrorist" who deserves "the harshest lawful punishment." The case is likely to face last-minute legal challenges over the switch in method from lethal injection, Hasan's original sentence, to firing squad, before any execution can proceed.
