Former Maj. Nidal Hasan is scheduled to be executed by firing squad at 1 p.m. Central Time on Dec. 3 at Fort Hood, Texas—the same post where, on Nov. 5, 2009, he killed 13 people and wounded 32 others. If the sentence is carried out, it would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and the Army’s first by firing squad since World War II.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said Monday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended the firing squad and President Donald Trump approved it. Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle then set the time and place. “Judgement day for Hasan has finally come,” Parnell wrote.
A 2019 rewrite of Army Regulation 190-55 dropped lethal injection as the specified means and left the choice to the secretary, on a recommendation from the provost marshal general. That is why a firing squad could be ordered at all.
Hasan, now 56, has been on military death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, since a panel of officers convicted him in 2013 of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder and unanimously sentenced him to death. At trial he admitted he was the shooter, said he had “switched sides,” and described the attack as an effort to protect Taliban fighters from U.S. soldiers heading to Afghanistan. Witnesses said he shouted “Allahu akbar” as he fired.
For the families who buried sons, daughters, and spouses that November, the years since have been a long wait. Direct appeals through the military courts ended when the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2025. Under military law, only the president can approve a death sentence. Once that approval is given, the Army secretary sets the method and date, which must fall between 60 and 150 days later.
Hasan is one of four men on military death row at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The others are Ronald Gray, convicted in 1988 of murders and rapes near Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Hasan Akbar, who killed fellow soldiers in Kuwait in 2003; and Timothy Hennis, convicted of killing a woman and her two children. Gray is the only one for whom a president has previously signed an execution order. George W. Bush approved it, and it was never carried out.
Hasan has been paralyzed since civilian police shot him during the attack and has spent the years since in a wheelchair. Among his victims were Pfc. Francheska Velez, who was pregnant, and Michael Cahill, 62, a civilian physician assistant and the only civilian killed. The rest were soldiers, many of them at the readiness center for checks before deployment.
The announcement also revives a record from Trump’s first term. After a 17-year pause, his Justice Department resumed federal civilian executions in July 2020 and put 13 people to death by lethal injection at the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, before he left office. The last was Dustin Higgs, pronounced dead at 1:23 a.m. on Jan. 16, 2021, five days before Joe Biden’s inauguration.
No president in more than a century had overseen as many federal executions. Those were civilian cases. A military execution requires a separate presidential sign-off and has not been carried out since Pvt. John Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth in 1961 for the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old girl in Austria.
Fort Hood officials have referred questions about the scheduled execution to Army headquarters. Hasan remains at Leavenworth.
Source: DPN, Editor, IA, October 7, 2026
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
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