The officer who stopped him
On 5 November 2009, Kimberly Munley ran toward the gunfire. The civilian police officer at Fort Hood, Texas, arrived at the Soldier Readiness Processing Center as Major Nidal Hasan — an Army psychiatrist about to deploy to Afghanistan — was murdering 13 people and wounding 32 others. Munley exchanged fire with him and was shot three times; her partner, Sergeant Mark Todd, fired the shots that brought Hasan down and ended the deadliest mass shooting on an American military base.
Seventeen years later, Munley remains the most recognisable survivor of that day — and one of its most outspoken. In 2013 she told ABC News she felt "betrayed" by a government that classified the attack as "workplace violence" rather than terrorism, denying victims Purple Hearts and priority care — an account preserved in the Congressional Record. She has carried the physical and institutional scars of Fort Hood ever since.
US Army soldiers during a gunnery certification exercise at Fort Hood, Texas.
Credit: Staff Sgt. Kimberly Hackbarth / US Army; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
So her voice carries unusual weight in the argument now engulfing Washington. Hasan's execution by Army firing squad is set for 3 December at Fort Hood, and the Pentagon has confirmed it will be livestreamed. Munley supports the execution — but not the cameras. A livestream, she says, would be a "media circus". Victims' families deserve closure, she argues — but closure is not a broadcast.
An unprecedented broadcast
The facts of the plan are stark. A Pentagon official confirmed to Reuters on 8 October: "It will be livestreamed. Details will follow." Gulf News's account of the confirmation notes it followed Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth's earlier remark that the execution would be "public". Hegseth, who championed the firing-squad method, said the public should be able to watch because people needed to understand that such crimes carried "serious consequences". The execution is scheduled for 1pm local time on a Thursday — around the time and day of the original shooting, a symmetry Hegseth called a "no-brainer".
If it proceeds, the broadcast would be without precedent in modern America. Experts told Reuters they were unaware of any other country currently televising or livestreaming a legally sanctioned execution; public executions persist in only a handful of states, including Iran and Taliban-run Afghanistan. The Times of India summarised the historic weight: it would be the first public execution in the US in 90 years. American media organisations have sought to televise executions before and have been blocked by the courts.
Hasan would be the first person executed by a US military firing squad since 1945, and the first member of the US armed forces executed by any method since John A. Bennett was hanged in 1961. Verity covered the firing-squad decision earlier this month; the livestream announcement, covered as a news story in this run, has now transformed a military punishment into a national argument about what justice should look like.
Closure, not spectacle
Munley's distinction — for the punishment, against the broadcast — deserves to be taken seriously, because it comes from someone who has paid for her views in blood. Her argument, as reported, is essentially this: the families who lost 13 people have waited nearly two decades for the sentence to be carried out, and they are owed finality. But finality delivered through a livestream risks converting their grief into content.
There is a hard logic to it. A livestream does not only show the execution; it shows it to everyone, forever — clipped, captioned, memed, replayed out of context by millions who never knew the victims' names. The families who sought closure could find instead that the worst day of their lives has been given a permanent, searchable afterlife. Munley, who watched the aftermath of the shooting become a media event in 2009 and then a political football for years afterward, knows better than most how public attention curdles.
Her position also carries a quiet rebuke to the deterrence argument. Hegseth's case for broadcast rests on the idea that watching consequences deters crime — "people need to understand that there's serious consequence for these types of things." But the evidence that public executions deter is thin, and the history of American spectacle is ugly: as Haaretz's reporting noted, extrajudicial lynchings were public spectacles well into the 20th century. A state that broadcasts death is making a statement about itself, not only about the condemned.
The case the other side makes
It would be dishonest to pretend the pro-broadcast position has no adherents beyond the Pentagon. Many victims' advocates argue that after 17 years of delays — Hasan's death sentence was upheld by the top military court in 2023 and his final appeal failed in 2025 — transparency is itself a form of respect: no secrecy, no rumour, no doubt that justice was done. Some families may genuinely wish to witness the moment, and a livestream is the only way most of them can. In this telling, the cameras are not a circus but a window — and refusing to open it would be the real indignity, a state carrying out its gravest act in the dark.
There is also a rawer sentiment, audible in much of the public commentary: that Hasan, who showed no mercy, deserves no dignity. It is an understandable feeling. It is also precisely the feeling that the rituals of justice — the solemnity, the procedure, the refusal to become what it punishes — are designed to withstand.
What the courts may yet decide
Whatever the public argues, the lawyers may have the last word. Civil liberties groups and legal scholars have raised the prospect of emergency challenges in civilian federal courts, and the Guardian's coverage notes the legal and ethical minefield the plan creates. Courts have blocked televised executions before; whether a livestream ordered by the executive as a demonstration of resolve survives judicial scrutiny is an open question.
The debate has been sharpened by timing. The announcement comes amid renewed national scrutiny of capital punishment following a botched lethal injection in Tennessee — a reminder, as Verity's recent reporting on a failed execution illustrated, that the machinery of death does not always work as designed. Broadcasting that machinery live raises the stakes of every possible failure.
Whose justice is it?
Strip away the politics and Munley's question remains: who is the execution for? If it is for the victims' families, then their wishes — including the wish not to have grief livestreamed — should govern. If it is for the public, then the public should ask what it means to be an audience for a killing. And if it is for the state, then the state should consider what it becomes when it performs death for viewers.
Munley stopped a massacre with a gun in her hand. She has earned the right to be heard on what justice looks like afterward. Her answer — yes to the firing squad, no to the cameras — is not contradiction. It is the distinction between punishment and spectacle. On 3 December, America will discover whether it can still tell the difference.
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