President Donald Trump has ordered the use of a firing squad to execute the former US Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in a 2009 shooting spree the gunman later described as retaliation for US wars in the Muslim world, the Pentagon said on Monday.
Death by firing squad was one of several forms of capital punishment the Trump administration recently added to permissible forms of execution for the gravest of federal crimes, along with electrocution and gas asphyxiation. He was left partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair from being shot by police upon his arrest. Plans by the state of Tennessee to execute a woman for the first time in more than 200 years went awry last week when prison personnel botched an attempt to administer a lethal injection, leaving the death-row inmate, Christa Pike, alive but unconscious and hospitalised on life support. A military jury sentenced Hasan to death in August 2013, after finding him guilty of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder for opening fire with a laser-sighted handgun in a medical facility at the sprawling central Texas military base. The shooting came weeks before Hasan, now 56, was scheduled to be deployed to Afghanistan.
Putting former US Army Major Nidal Hasan to death by the Army firing squad was approved by Trump at the recommendation of Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said on X. In a statement responding to Trump’s decision, the group Death Penalty Action, which opposes capital punishment, said, “There is nothing Donald Trump loves more than the power to kill.”
