The US Department of Defense has confirmed it will livestream the execution by firing squad of Nidal Hasan, the former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the 3 December date and framed the broadcast as deterrence: 'People need to understand there's serious consequences for these types of things.' If carried out, it would be the first public execution in the United States in nearly a century. Mental health professionals have responded with a clear consensus: watching a state killing on screen carries real psychiatric risk. Dr Simon Duff, a forensic psychologist at the University of Nottingham, pointed to studies of journalists who witness violence and noted evidence of trauma response even among trained observers. He flagged an additional danger — executions do not always go to plan, as the failed lethal injection of Christa Pike recently demonstrated. A botched firing squad on livestream would magnify viewer harm exponentially. Professor Neil Greenberg of King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience raised a subtler point about trigger warnings. Research shows they do not cause people to avoid distressing content. Instead, they prime anticipatory anxiety, making the eventual viewing more psychologically damaging. People with pre-existing mental health conditions face the highest risk of deterioration. His advice was unequivocal: do not watch. The historical record is equally unambiguous. Public executions in England and Wales were abolished in 1868 — not out of squeamishness, but because the evidence showed they did not deter crime and actively degraded public behaviour. Prof Rosalind Crone of the Open University cited Charles Dickens' 1846 letter to the Daily News, which described execution crowds characterized by 'ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness and flouting vice in fifty other shapes.' Crowds skipped work, got drunk, and treated death as entertainment. The deterrence theory collapsed under its own evidence. The mechanism Hegseth is invoking — public punishment as social discipline — has a centuries-long empirical track record of failure. What it reliably produces is desensitization, performative cruelty as civic ritual, and the transformation of state violence into content. Livestreaming adds algorithmic distribution, clip culture, and reaction-video incentives to a format that already degraded social order when it was limited to a physical crowd in a town square. Only two of the 17 countries that carried out executions last year did so publicly. The US is proposing to join a category of governance practice that the vast majority of executing states have already abandoned. The policy choice is not between justice and impunity for Hasan's crimes — the conviction and death sentence already exist. The choice is whether to convert that sentence into mass-distributed content optimized for political spectacle. The extraction pattern is straightforward: political capital is generated for officials who perform toughness, while the psychiatric costs are distributed across millions of viewers — disproportionately those with pre-existing vulnerabilities. The deterrence justification, tested across centuries and continents, has never held. What remains is punishment as performance, with the public cast as both audience and casualty.
