President Trump has approved a firing squad execution for convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced the decision Monday on X, stating that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended the method and the president signed off. The execution would mark the first U.S. Military death sentence carried out in more than six decades, a gap stretching back to 1961.
“Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has recommended — and President Donald J. Trump has approved — death by U.S. Army firing squad for convicted terrorist Nidal Malik Hasan, the jihadist who opened fire on unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009,” Parnell wrote on the platform.
Hasan, a former Army major and psychiatrist, killed 12 service members and one civilian while wounding 32 others during his November 2009 rampage at the Texas base. Parnell noted in his post that the officer-turned-attacker was “shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ during the attack.”
“The Secretary of the Army will set the time and place of the execution,” Parnell added in his statement. “Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.”
The Army now faces the task of preparing infrastructure and protocols for carrying out a military execution, a process it has not undertaken since the early 1960s. The service has reportedly begun laying groundwork for resuming death row procedures pending final authorization.
Hasan has remained on military death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, since his 2013 court-martial conviction on 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder. A military jury unanimously sentenced him to death after he represented himself at trial and offered little defense, having previously attempted to plead guilty in a move military courts rejected.
The case has long stirred political and legal battles over military justice, with multiple appeals and procedural delays keeping the sentence unenforced for over a decade. Hasan’s actions at Fort Hood were later reclassified as a terrorist attack rather than workplace violence following pressure from victims’ families and lawmakers.
The choice of firing squad specifically carries historical weight in military executions, though lethal injection has become the default method in most civilian capital cases where states still permit the death penalty. Utah remains the only state to have used firing squad in modern times, most recently in 2010.
The November 2009 attack unfolded as Hasan, then 39, opened fire at a Soldier Readiness Processing Center where personnel were preparing for deployment. He fired more than 100 rounds before civilian police officers shot him, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Survivors and family members of those killed have repeatedly pressed for the sentence to be carried out, with some attending court proceedings throughout years of appeals.
The Pentagon has not specified a timeline for setting the execution date, leaving that authority to the Secretary of the Army under military regulations governing capital cases.