Legal path seems narrow to challenge livestream of Fort Hood shooter's execution, experts say

Any effort to challenge the Trump administration's plan to livestream the firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan might rest solely with the man sentenced to death for killing 13 people at the Texas military base in 2009, experts say.

Broadcasting the event worldwide isn't mentioned in the Army rules governing how rare military executions are carried out. But that doesn't mean there is a viable legal path to oppose it by anyone besides Hasan. And he hasn't signaled whether he will even try to stop anything related to his Dec. 3 death sentence.

Officials at the Pentagon said Thursday that Hasan’s execution by a firing squad would be livestreamed and that more details would follow. A day earlier, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public.”

“Other than Hasan, I'm not sure anyone could” have legal standing to stop a livestream, said Brenner Fissell, a professor at Villanova University’s law school and an expert in military justice.

Fissell, however, tossed up a novel possibility: parents who don’t want their children to see a person blasted with bullets on the internet, either in real time or viewed later. Army regulations say, “No person under the age of 18 shall witness” a military execution.

“That’s explicit,” Fissell said. “It’s a question of whether a livestream counts as a presence. ... I think it violates the spirit of the regulation."

The regulations, he added, weren’t written to contemplate witnesses outside the actual site of an execution — and certainly not a livestream.

“This actually has not been explored enough,” Fissell said.

Eugene R. Fidell, a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School specializing in military law, said he doesn't see a lot of legal options to challenge most of the unfolding details of Hasan's execution, though he agrees that Hasan would have standing to object with a petition, known as habeas corpus, in U.S. District Court.

“Arguing the Army can’t livestream it because some parent wouldn’t be able to stop their kid from watching it on the computer strikes me as a very unlikely piece of litigation,” Fidell said. “Better legal minds than me maybe can come up with a way to make that argument, but I don’t see it.”

Hasan, an Army psychiatrist who held the rank of major, walked into a medical building on Nov. 5, 2009, where soldiers at Fort Hood were waiting to receive medical clearance for deployment. He shouted “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — and opened fire and also shot at the backs of soldiers fleeing toward the parking lot.

Hasan said it was an effort to stop them from going to Afghanistan and killing his fellow Muslims. He is paralyzed from the waist down after being shot in the back by law enforcement, and he now uses a wheelchair.

Clergy, including U.S. Catholic bishops, and some officials criticized the livestreaming announcement. Vice President JD Vance, meanwhile, told reporters that he wouldn't watch it and expressed some doubt whether a livestream would happen.

President Donald Trump signed off on Hasan's execution, which would be the first by a firing squad since World War II. The last military execution happened on April 13, 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was killed by hanging.

A 2023 update to the Army regulation on executions gave the Secretary of the Army discretion on choosing a method, in part to ease hurdles to conducting executions at Guantanamo Bay, Fidell said.

A firing squad is “clearly a legal method of execution in the military,” Fissell said.