Trump approves a firing squad for Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan

President Donald Trump has approved the use of a firing squad to carry out the death sentence on former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the psychiatrist convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, on 5 November 2009. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said on Monday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended the method and that Trump approved it. The secretary of the Army will set the time and place.

Parnell wrote on X: "Judgement day for Hasan has finally come." Reuters rendered the same line as "Judgment day." The spelling difference is in the posts and wire copy, not in the legal order.

Hasan is one of four men on the military death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. A court-martial sentenced him to death in August 2013. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice a death sentence imposed by court-martial cannot be carried out until the president approves it. Approval starts a further set of steps. It does not, by itself, set a date.

The Associated Press reported that Hasan can still file a habeas corpus petition in the civilian federal courts and that such a petition can hold an execution for years. An article in the May issue of Army Lawyer, cited by AP, described that route as the practical pause after presidential approval. Ronald Gray, another inmate at Leavenworth, received presidential approval from George W. Bush in 2008. That execution has not been carried out.

What the 2009 attack was

Hasan, then a major and an Army psychiatrist, entered a processing centre at Fort Hood where soldiers were receiving medical checks before deployment. He shouted "Allahu akbar" and opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun. Reuters counted 12 unarmed active-duty soldiers and one retired serviceman killed, and 32 wounded. AP used the round figure of more than 30 injured. The base is now Fort Cavazos. The 2009 name is the one used in the conviction record.

At trial Hasan acted largely as his own lawyer. He told the panel that the evidence would show he was the shooter and described himself as a soldier who had switched sides. He said he wanted to stop soldiers from deploying to Afghanistan. The panel convicted him and condemned him. He has been at the US Disciplinary Barracks since.

The attack was first recorded by the Army as workplace violence. Congress later directed that the victims be treated as killed or wounded in a terrorist attack for the purpose of the Purple Heart and related benefits. That reclassification is separate from the capital sentence, which has stood since 2013.

Why a firing squad, and why it is rare

The US military has not executed a service member since 13 April 1961, when Pvt. John A. Bennett was hanged at Leavenworth for the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old girl in Austria. BBC described the Hasan order as the first military firing-squad execution planned since the end of the Second World War. The two claims sit together: no military execution of any kind since 1961, and no firing squad in the military system since the war-crimes cases of the 1940s.

Reuters noted that the Trump administration has, in recent months, added firing squad, electrocution and gas asphyxiation to the methods available for the gravest federal civilian crimes. The Hasan order is a military case, so the controlling statute is the UCMJ, not the Federal Death Penalty Act. The choice of method still has to be lawful under military regulations, and the Army secretary's scheduling decision is the next formal act.

The US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces held the military death penalty unconstitutional in 1983. President Ronald Reagan reinstated it by executive order the following year. Since then the armed forces have imposed death sentences and have not carried one out. The gap is procedural as much as political. Appellate review inside the military system, then presidential action, then civilian habeas, has stacked delay on delay.

What approval does not settle

Presidential approval removes one statutory condition. It does not wipe the habeas right, and it does not pick the day. Parnell said the Army secretary will decide time and place. Until that order exists, and until any civilian stay is resolved, Hasan remains a condemned prisoner rather than a man with an execution date.

The other three men on the military death row are a reminder of how long that status can last. Gray has had presidential approval for 18 years. Hasan's case is newer at the approval stage and older at the crime stage: the shootings were 17 years ago this November. Families of the dead have waited through the trial, the appeals inside the military courts, and the years at Leavenworth. The order on Monday moves the file. It does not close it.

If the Army does carry out the sentence, it will be the first military execution in 65 years, and the first by firing squad in the US armed forces since the 1940s. The condition on that sentence is the one AP flagged: a habeas petition in federal court can stop the clock again.