Pennsylvania state Rep. Ben Waxman, a Philadelphia Democrat who has spent much of his career opposing capital punishment, publicly rebuked the Pentagon on Thursday night over its plan to livestream the Army firing squad execution of Fort Hood gunman Nidal Hasan, a broadcast that would be unprecedented in modern American history.
In a post on X at 7:55 p.m. on October 8, 2026, Waxman wrote:
“The government should not livestream executions by firing squad.”
The post came hours after Reuters reported that the Pentagon intends to broadcast the December 3 execution of Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at the Texas base in 2009. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who championed the push to carry out the sentence by firing squad, confirmed the livestream plans in his own X post.
Waxman’s statement was a single sentence, and it did not name Hegseth, Hasan, or the Pentagon. It addressed the broadcast itself, drawing a line at the government displaying an execution to the public, whatever the crime or the condemned person’s identity. The full text of the post reads: “The government should not livestream executions by firing squad.”
The remark fits a long record. According to his official biography on the Pennsylvania House Democratic Caucus website, Waxman has served on the board of Pennsylvanians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. First elected in November 2022 to represent Center City and parts of South Philadelphia, he took office in January 2023.
On November 1, 2023, Waxman appeared in a video posted on the House website celebrating the Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee’s approval of legislation to abolish the state’s death penalty. The caucus described him in that post as “a longtime proponent of repealing PA’s death penalty.” He stood with advocates and colleagues at the event.
The issue has returned to Harrisburg this year. On April 27, 2026, the House Judiciary Committee voted H.B. 99, state Rep. Chris Rabb’s bill to abolish the death penalty, out of committee, sending it to the House floor. According to a release on the House site, the bill would make Pennsylvania the 24th state to end capital punishment.
The federal plan Waxman is reacting to moved quickly. The Pentagon said on Monday that President Donald Trump had approved the execution of Hasan by firing squad on Hegseth’s recommendation. Under U.S. military law, a president must approve an execution by firing squad. The White House declined to say whether Trump supports the livestreaming and referred questions to the Pentagon. Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell wrote on X that “Judgment day for Hasan has finally come.”
Hegseth defended the decision in remarks on the Human Events Daily program. He called the choice to execute Hasan at Fort Hood on a Thursday at 1 p.m. a “no-brainer,” because it matches the approximate time, weekday, and location of the 2009 shooting. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public. Because people need to understand that … there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said. Asked whether Hasan had made any final requests, he replied: “Don’t care. We’ll see him on December 3.”
A military jury sentenced Hasan to death in August 2013 after convicting him of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder. The shooting came weeks before Hasan, now 56, was due to deploy to Afghanistan. Police shot him during his arrest, leaving him partially paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair. If carried out, his execution would be the first by the U.S. military since 1961, according to the group Death Penalty Action, and the first by a military firing squad since 1945, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Legal and historical experts cast the livestream as a sharp break from precedent. Eugene Fidell, a military law expert who lectures at Yale Law School, said it “would be extremely, extremely strange” and that, as far as he knew, no U.S. execution has been livestreamed or televised. He said Hasan would need to sue in federal court to block a public display, and noted the Supreme Court “has never addressed this question.” Jonathan Lurie, a historian of military justice, said there are no compelling reasons to make the execution public: “What’s the point of it? Who would want to see that?”
The history of public executions in the United States adds weight to the debate. Reuters reported that media outlets have sought to televise executions in the past but were blocked by the courts, and that no other country is known to televise or livestream a legal execution. The last legally sanctioned public execution in the United States took place in 1936, when thousands watched the hanging of a young Black man convicted of raping a white woman, according to death penalty experts. Among countries known to have carried out public executions in recent years are Iran and Taliban-run Afghanistan.
The announcement also arrives during a heightened national argument over how the country executes prisoners. Firing squads are one of several methods, along with electrocution and gas asphyxiation, that the Trump administration recently added to the permissible forms of execution for the gravest federal crimes, in part because lethal injection drugs have become harder to obtain. At least five states have firing squads on the books, and South Carolina carried out the first such execution in the country in 15 years in 2025, the Death Penalty Information Center reported.
Last week, Tennessee officials botched an attempt to execute Christa Pike by lethal injection, leaving her alive but hospitalized. Her lawyers said Wednesday that she awoke “angry and confused” and remains very sick and shackled to her hospital bed. It would have been the first execution of a woman in Tennessee in more than 200 years.
A search of Waxman’s official House news releases and public statements found no remarks by him about Hasan, the 2009 shooting, Hegseth, or President Trump on capital punishment. His Thursday post offers no further detail on his reasoning. It does place him among the critics who say the question is whether the government should put a death on public display, which is separate from whether Hasan should be put to death.
The Pentagon has not said how the livestream would be distributed or who would control it. Whether Hasan will challenge the plan in federal court is also unknown. The execution is scheduled for December 3 at Fort Hood, Texas.