Justice Does Not Need an Audience

There should be a profound difference between the government carrying out a lawful death sentence and the government turning a killing into a broadcast event.

The Pentagon has announced that the December 3 execution of Nidal Malik Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people and injuring 32 others in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, will be carried out by firing squad and livestreamed to the public. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the government would make sure people could watch because “people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

That decision is grotesque.

This is not about minimizing Hasan’s crimes. It is not about pretending that what happened at Fort Hood was anything less than horrific. And it does not require opposition to the death penalty itself.

The question is what we should expect from government when it exercises the most severe and irreversible power it possesses.

An execution should not be entertainment. It should not be content. And it should not be transformed into a spectacle designed for a mass audience.

Transparency Is Not the Same as Spectacle

The distinction between transparency and exhibitionism matters.

Government should absolutely be accountable for how it carries out a death sentence. There are legitimate reasons for witnesses, documentation, reporting, legal scrutiny, and public information about what the government has done.

Indeed, Fordham law professor Deborah Denno, a death penalty expert, told the Associated Press that livestreaming could make the process more transparent and help the public understand what capital punishment actually entails. That is not a frivolous argument.

But transparency does not require mass spectatorship.

An execution can be witnessed by journalists, attorneys, victims’ families, officials, independent observers, and others capable of documenting whether the government carried out the sentence lawfully. Procedures can be scrutinized. Records can be released. The public can know precisely what happened without the government providing a live video feed of a person being killed.

A livestream does something fundamentally different.

Once the government broadcasts an execution, it creates digital media that can be clipped, reposted, and repurposed indefinitely.

The government may control the execution. It will not control what happens to the footage afterward.

The execution becomes something people consume. That should bother us.

The Arguments for Public Execution Miss the Point

Some defenders of public executions have pointed to history. Executions were once public in America and throughout the Western world. Puritan New England, in particular, treated executions as community events intended not merely to punish the condemned but to warn everyone watching.

That history is real.

Increase Mather’s A Sermon Occasioned by the Execution of a Man Found Guilty of Murder , preached in Boston in March 1686, provides a striking example. Mather explicitly argued that a murderer should be put to death by “Publick Justice,” framing capital punishment as an act carried out through lawful civil authority.

The execution itself also served a broader moral purpose. Mather repeatedly turned from the condemned man to the audience, urging those witnessing the punishment to examine their own lives, repent, and treat the fate before them as a warning.

So yes, public execution has historical precedent. But the fact that Puritan New England publicly executed murderers is not much of an argument for livestreaming executions in 2026.

Those executions existed within an entirely different social, legal, religious, and technological environment. A crowd gathered at a scaffold is not the same thing as the federal government transmitting a person’s death across the world and creating footage that can circulate forever.

History can tell us that public execution was once considered legitimate. It cannot answer whether resurrecting that practice through modern mass media is wise.

And there is another historical point worth remembering: American society eventually moved away from public executions. Whatever purposes public punishment once served, the spectacle surrounding executions increasingly became part of the reason they disappeared from public squares.

The last one makes the point. In August 1936, as many as 20,000 people crowded into Owensboro, Kentucky, to watch Rainey Bethea hang. The crowds and national press attention so embarrassed the state that Kentucky’s legislature changed the law in 1938, and no American government has held a public execution since. Hasan’s would be the first in 90 years.

The better historical question is therefore not simply, “Did Americans once do this?” They did. The better question is why we stopped.

“It Is Done in Our Name, So We Should Have to See It”

A stronger argument for broadcasting executions deserves serious consideration.

If government kills someone in the name of the public, perhaps citizens should be forced to confront exactly what that means.

That argument has real appeal.

Government should not hide extraordinary exercises of power behind euphemism or bureaucracy. If citizens support capital punishment, they should understand what capital punishment actually entails.

But again, accountability and spectatorship are different things.

We do not generally establish government accountability by insisting that every citizen be given live video access to every disturbing act carried out by the state.

Public records, independent witnesses, journalists, judicial review, legislative oversight, and procedural transparency all exist precisely because accountability does not require turning government activity into entertainment.

If the principle is that the public should understand what government does in its name, then government should explain and document its actions.

That does not mean it should produce them for an audience.

“Public Executions Might Deter Crime”

Another argument is that public punishment has a broader social benefit. If people see the consequences of murder, perhaps they will be less likely to commit murder.

That idea is hardly new.

The Puritan execution sermon was built around precisely that premise. The condemned criminal became a cautionary example for everyone else. Mather warned his listeners to consider the condemned man’s fate and avoid the sins that had brought him there.

But asserting a deterrent effect and demonstrating one are different things.

Reason’s Liz Wolfe puts the question directly: does watching an execution actually turn people with violent tendencies away from violence, or does it simply make the rest of us more accustomed to seeing people’s final moments on camera?

And even if one accepts that punishment can have a deterrent function, that still does not establish that livestreaming it is necessary.

Knowing that the state will impose the ultimate punishment for certain crimes is not the same as watching that punishment happen in real time.

If anything, transforming an execution into media risks obscuring the seriousness defenders of capital punishment claim they want to communicate.

“If You Support the Death Penalty, Why Object to Watching It?”

This may be the easiest objection to answer.

Believing the death penalty can be justified is entirely consistent with believing executions should be carried out with sobriety and restraint.

In fact, the gravity of capital punishment may be an argument for more restraint, not less.

If execution is supposed to represent justice rather than revenge, then the manner in which government carries it out matters.

A government execution should communicate that the state takes no pleasure in killing, even when it concludes that killing is legally warranted.

That becomes much harder to maintain when the government starts advertising the opportunity to watch.

Supporting a legal power does not require treating every possible exercise of that power as appropriate.

Someone can support incarceration without wanting prisons turned into reality television. Someone can support military force without believing combat footage should be packaged as government entertainment. And someone can believe that the death penalty is lawful and justified in certain cases without believing citizens should gather around screens to watch the state kill someone.

Those are different questions.

“Did You Celebrate When Someone Else Died?”

Another objection tries to shift the discussion from government conduct to individual behavior.

Did you celebrate the death of a terrorist? Did you cheer when someone particularly evil was killed? If so, what right do you have to object now?

But that does not answer the institutional question.

Private human reactions to death and the deliberate conduct of government are not morally or institutionally interchangeable.

People respond to the deaths of evil men in all kinds of ways. They may feel relief, satisfaction, anger, vindication, grief, or even celebration.

Government should be held to a different standard precisely because government possesses powers individuals do not.

The issue is not whether Nidal Hasan deserves anyone’s sympathy. It is whether the United States government should deliberately create a public spectacle around killing him.

Government restraint should not depend on whether the condemned person is sympathetic.

The principles governing state power matter most when virtually nobody feels sympathy for the person against whom that power is being exercised.

The Terrorism Problem Makes This Worse

Hasan’s case also presents a practical problem.

Reason’s Robby Soave put it bluntly: a public execution gives a terrorist exactly what he wants, which is publicity. Hasan committed mass murder at Fort Hood, and in 2010 he told military evaluators he would “still be a martyr” if executed. Turning his execution into a globally available video hands an extremist precisely the kind of imagery and notoriety that governments usually try not to provide.

We have been here before. In 2001, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 168 people, suggested his execution should be broadcast nationally. Attorney General John Ashcroft refused, allowing survivors and victims’ families to watch on closed-circuit television instead, because he wanted to restrict a mass murderer’s access to “a public podium.” The public agreed: while three-quarters of Americans supported executing McVeigh, 73 percent said his execution should not be broadcast.

The government understood then that the man who wanted the camera was the last person who should get it.

Think about what happens after the execution.

Clips will not remain neatly confined to an official government livestream. They can be stripped of context. Edited. Set to music. Distributed through extremist channels. Reframed as martyrdom propaganda. Turned into memes. Consumed by people who never cared about the legal proceeding, the victims, or the crimes that brought Hasan to the firing squad.

At that point, whatever solemn message the government intended to send has been surrendered to the internet.

A policy supposedly intended to demonstrate the consequences of terrorism could wind up creating propaganda material for terrorists.

That should at least give policymakers pause.

Public Execution Changes the Relationship Between Citizen and State

A more fundamental question remains. What does government want the citizen to be in this moment?

An informed member of the public? A witness holding government accountable? Or a spectator?

Those are not the same thing.

A constitutional government necessarily exercises frightening powers. It can imprison. It can use military force. It can authorize police to use deadly force. And where capital punishment remains lawful, it can deliberately take the life of someone convicted of a sufficiently serious crime.

The existence of those powers makes restraint all the more important.

We should want government officials to understand the gravity of what they are authorized to do. We should also resist turning the exercise of those powers into theater.

The Associated Press reports that the military has not carried out an execution since 1961. That rarity should reinforce the seriousness of the occasion.

Instead, the Pentagon has chosen to introduce an entirely new element: a potentially global audience.

Justice Does Not Need an Audience

Modern politics increasingly assumes that everything must be performed.

Government announcements become social media content. Political confrontation becomes entertainment. Serious questions of law and power are increasingly packaged for virality.

An execution should be one place where that instinct stops. There is no contradiction in demanding transparency while rejecting spectacle. There is no contradiction in supporting punishment while rejecting entertainment. And there is no contradiction in believing a murderer deserves the sentence imposed upon him while also believing government should carry out that sentence with restraint.

The administration of justice should be solemn precisely because the power being exercised is so enormous.

Government should document what it does. It should permit meaningful oversight. It should answer questions about its procedures. It should be accountable for every action taken in carrying out a death sentence.

But accountability does not require an audience of millions.

A confident government does not need theatricality.

Justice does not become more just because more people can watch it happen. Punishment does not become more legitimate because it can be streamed. And the gravity of an execution is not enhanced by giving the public a front-row seat.

The state carrying out a lawful sentence is one thing. The state inviting the world to watch the killing is something else entirely.

We should know the difference.