The Spectacle of the Scaffold
Why Broadcasting an Execution Corrodes the Soul
The argument should begin with the people Nidal Malik Hasan murdered. Thirteen were killed at Fort Hood in 2009: twelve service members and one civilian. Their families have lived with the consequences ever since. Hasan’s guilt was established by a military court, and the Army has scheduled his execution by firing squad for December 3, 2026. (AP News)
Those facts deserve to remain at the center of the discussion. Every person killed had a life extending far beyond the circumstances of that death. The families are entitled to their grief and anger. Forgiveness, should it ever come, belongs to them; politicians and commentators have no authority to demand it.
The Pentagon’s announced intention to livestream the execution introduces a separate decision: to make the destruction of a human life available for public consumption. Trump has subsequently said he is still considering whether to authorize the broadcast. The proposal itself has already drawn condemnation from lawmakers, religious leaders, human-rights organizations, and the United Nations. (Reuters)
Filmed executions have precedents. The unauthorized mobile-phone footage of Saddam Hussein’s hanging in 2006 remains an obvious example. An officially organized broadcast adds the authority of the state to the invitation to watch. Government would assume responsibility for the sentence, its execution, and the audience. (RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty)
Accounts of firing-squad procedures supply a chillingly orderly inventory: a chair with restraints for the body and head, an oval canvas backdrop, surrounding sandbags, a black hood, and a physician locating the heart before placing a fabric target over it. These are descriptions of general procedures; the Army’s public announcement establishes Hasan’s execution date and method while leaving the detailed arrangements unspecified. (Death Penalty Information Center)
Even as a general description, the sequence is disturbing. Everything has a designated place. The question is what place the spectators are supposed to occupy in it.
The Politics of an Audience
The political temptation is easy to understand. An administration struggling to turn promises into results may find the spectacle of punishment attractive. It offers an unmistakable demonstration of authority, a convicted villain, and a television moment requiring very little explanation.
In my view, the proposed broadcast invites a familiar partisan maneuver. Provoke liberal outrage, describe the outrage as sympathy for a terrorist, and ask wavering supporters to remember whom they dislike more. Opposition to the spectacle can then be packaged as an objection to holding a murderer accountable. The electoral usefulness depends on keeping those two questions conveniently confused.
There is a certain administrative economy to this approach. Improving people’s lives requires sustained work across many institutions. Providing them with someone to hate is considerably easier.
The calculation also carries a serious risk. A person can support severe punishment and recoil from an invitation to watch a killing. Republican opposition has already made that clear, and Vice President JD Vance has said he would decline to watch the proposed livestream. The assumption that revulsion belongs exclusively to the political left is already encountering difficulties. (PBS)
The response from victims’ families deserves particular attention. Keely Vanacker, whose father, Michael Grant Cahill, was killed at Fort Hood, has opposed the broadcast, describing it as entertainment built around a tragedy that continues to affect her family. Her objection carries a weight that an argument about polling points cannot supply. (People.com)
A state acting in the victims’ name should listen carefully when their relatives explain that its proposed tribute would deepen their distress. Grief is personal. Its use as political scenery is a choice made by other people.
What Happens to the Person Watching?
Beyond electoral calculation lies the more difficult question of the spectator.
Hasan committed mass murder and betrayed the people alongside whom he served. His punishment can be discussed with complete recognition of that responsibility. Our conduct in administering and observing punishment requires its own moral examination.
Writing in the early fourth century, the Christian thinker Lactantius addressed precisely this problem. A person who takes pleasure in seeing a condemned man killed, he argued, “pollutes his conscience,” even where the condemned man’s guilt is established. The warning concerned what the spectacle does to the person enjoying it. (Christian Classics Ethereal Library)
This deserves to be taken seriously because the attraction is painfully ordinary. Curiosity, anger, disgust, and the desire to see justice done can become entangled. Someone opens a video to find out what happened, continues watching to see what happens next, and gradually discovers that another person’s terror has acquired an entertainment value.
It would be comforting to assign that appetite to a handful of unusually cruel people. History gives us ample reason for greater modesty.
Public executions once attracted enormous crowds. Spectators paid for windows and grandstand seats. Vendors sold refreshments and accounts of the condemned person’s final words. The London Museum records an entire commercial life surrounding executions, with householders, traders, and authorities all finding opportunities in the occasion. The public good was invoked, and a good view could be rented. (London Museum)
The justification was educational: prospective criminals would witness punishment and learn fear. Yet the spectacle also taught spectators that another person’s death was an acceptable occasion for recreation. When public executions were abolished in Britain in 1868, concern about the brutalizing effect on the audience was part of the argument. Capital punishment continued behind prison walls; ending its public display was a distinct moral and political decision. (London Museum)
That distinction remains important. Public accountability requires witnesses, reliable reporting, accessible records, and scrutiny of official conduct. A government cultivating an audience for the moment of death creates another relationship entirely: it asks citizens to participate emotionally in the punishment.
The question each viewer must face is simple and uncomfortable: what am I hoping to feel when this person dies?
A Spectacle Beyond Government Control
A global broadcast would also hand the state’s images to people with purposes of their own.
The administration may intend to demonstrate the consequences of terrorism. Extremist propagandists could turn the same recording into a story of martyrdom, editing it, attaching their own commentary, and circulating it for years. Mike Johnson has warned that an execution video could become a recruitment tool for terrorists. (The Washington Post)
For someone seeking posthumous fame, the prospect of a worldwide audience may itself be an attraction. A final gesture or slogan could become the material from which followers manufacture an icon. The government would supply the stage and recording equipment; its control over their subsequent use would be severely limited.
The risks also extend to people who never intended to watch. Once a recording exists, clips can circulate through feeds, messages, and reposts. Children may encounter them. Survivors and bereaved families may meet the images unexpectedly, long after officials have declared the matter concluded. Specialists have already raised concerns about the possible effects on children of the proposed livestream and its wider circulation. (AP News)
There is an ugly resemblance here to the appetite associated with so-called snuff media: the attraction of watching an actual human death. An official emblem and a lawful sentence give the recording a different legal and institutional setting. They leave the viewer’s appetite requiring the same examination.
The condemned man’s wickedness supplies a particularly persuasive permission slip. He caused suffering, he knew what he was doing, and he deserves punishment. All of that can be true. Pleasure in his fear still asks something of our conscience.
Christian ascetical tradition speaks of “guarding the heart”: maintaining attention over the thoughts and impulses we admit and cultivate. It is a discipline of watchfulness, rooted in the understanding that destructive habits can develop quietly and become familiar before we recognize their hold over us. (Orthodox Church in America)
Applied here, the obligation is intensely practical. We should take care over the images we choose to consume and the satisfaction we permit ourselves to derive from them. Repeatedly rehearsing delight in another person’s suffering can change what begins to feel acceptable.
The concern reaches beyond private spirituality. When the state lends its authority to that enjoyment, it helps establish a public norm. Citizens are invited to feel that cruelty becomes virtuous once the correct person has been selected to receive it.
Civilization depends on keeping limits that anger would gladly abolish.
A Sentence for the Rest of His Life
For crimes of this magnitude, I favor life imprisonment without parole.
Permanent, secure confinement gives the law a severe and enduring answer. The offender loses his freedom and remains accountable for the rest of his life. Every ordinary choice about where to go, how to spend a day, and how to live is bounded by the sentence.
There is ample severity in that punishment. It can be administered under humane conditions, with medical care, discipline, and protection from abuse. A civilized state should be capable of keeping a dangerous person imprisoned while remaining responsible for how it treats him.
Years in prison also preserve the possibility of confronting what one has done. Remorse remains a personal moral act, and a court cannot command it into existence. An offender may resist it for the rest of his life. Execution ends that possibility altogether.
The point is particularly important in an article about cruelty. Advocating imprisonment because it might produce greater suffering would reproduce the same appetite under a different arrangement. The purpose should be protection, accountability, and a punishment proportionate to the crime, administered within limits that bind the state as well as the prisoner.
The strongest practical objection to capital punishment remains the fallibility of the institutions entrusted with it.
Hasan’s established guilt tells us about Hasan. A durable legal system must also account for defendants whose cases involve mistaken witnesses, unreliable evidence, misconduct, inadequate representation, or mistakes that become visible years after conviction. Kirk Bloodsworth, released in 1993 after DNA testing established his innocence, was the first American death-row prisoner exonerated through post-conviction DNA evidence. His case gives this concern a name and a life. (National Library of Medicine)
A wrongful prison sentence steals years that can never be restored. Exoneration can still secure the person’s release, clear the record, and permit some measure of repair. After execution, the state’s options narrow to correcting its paperwork and explaining itself to the family.
That limitation should remain central whenever a society considers restoring or expanding capital punishment. Laws written in the emotional aftermath of an atrocity endure long after the immediate anger subsides. They will be administered by future officials, against future defendants, on evidence the public has yet to see.
Promises of public safety also require more than conviction in the rhetorical sense. The National Research Council’s major 2012 review found the available research inadequate to determine the death penalty’s effect on homicide rates, including its effect relative to noncapital punishments. Claims of a proven additional deterrent therefore exceed what that review established. (National Institute of Justice)
There is also the temptation to widen the authority once granted. A power justified through the most appalling crime remains available to later governments seeking answers to other fears. Every expansion can acquire its own compelling example and its own public campaign. The public is asked to imagine an unmistakably guilty monster; the statute must be administered in a world populated by fallible officials.
The Limits We Keep
In Christian understanding, final and absolute judgment belongs to God. Human courts must work with incomplete knowledge, imperfect evidence, and people capable of error, vanity, and corruption. Their duty is serious precisely because their powers are limited and their decisions can destroy lives.
This requires humility from institutions accustomed to speaking with authority. It requires restraint from citizens whose anger may be entirely understandable. It also requires remembering that a punishment is administered to a human being, even when that person has committed acts that place enormous strain on our willingness to remember it.
The thirteen people Hasan murdered deserve lasting remembrance. Their families and the wounded deserve care extending well beyond the news cycle. Their killer, in my view, should spend the rest of his life in prison.
Those obligations are serious enough to occupy a civilized state. Producing a spectacle for everyone else should never become the fourth.