Washington Examiner chief political correspondent Byron York argued that the debate over publicly livestreaming Nidal Hasan’s execution is clouding support for carrying out his death sentence.
“I think a lot of Trump supporters were very, very happy when they heard that the Pentagon planned to carry out the execution of Nidal Hasan, who killed so many people at that military base in Texas,” York said on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier on Friday.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed Thursday that the execution would be streamed publicly. Hasan was convicted and sentenced to death for killing 13 people and wounding 32 others at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas, on Nov. 5, 2009. Hasan was a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist.
“It’s really extraordinary,” York said.
York said Hasan’s execution has broad public support after more than a decade on death row, but the prospect of livestreaming it has given some Americans pause.
“Not only do [Trump voters] support the death penalty, they think that if anybody deserves it, it’s Nidal Hasan. But the issue has become kind of clouded over the public execution debate,” York said.
York highlighted that public executions stopped “a long time ago.” The last public execution in the United States was in 1936 in Owensboro, Kentucky, where a black man named Rainey Bethea, convicted of raping and killing a 70-year-old woman, was lynched in front of roughly 20,000 people.
York said having witnesses to executions is important, but expressed caution at making them public.
“We have witnesses to executions, but that’s to make sure that the state is actually carrying them out responsibly. The debacle in Tennessee recently is good reason why we need to do that. But still, publicly? I don’t know,” York said.
TRUMP REITERATES FORT HOOD SHOOTER SHOULD BE EXECUTED AMID CRITICISM OF LIVESTREAM DECISION
York referred to the botched attempts to execute 50-year-old Christa Pike, who was awake and speaking nearly a week after two failed lethal injections, which left her unconscious and intubated in a Nashville hospital. She eventually was able to get up and walk.
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, a War Department official said further details will follow.