October 5, 2026Updated October 6, 2026, 9:33 a.m. ET
President Donald Trump approved the military execution by firing squad of former Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, responsible for the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood that killed 13 people.
Trump approved Hasan’s execution by firing squad on the recommendation of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell announced in an article on X on October 5.
“The day of reckoning has finally come,” Parnell wrote.
The U.S. military has not carried out an execution since 1961, according to data kept by the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization. That year, the United States hanged Army Pvt. John Bennett in a Kansas prison for the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old girl.
Parnell said Army Secretary Adam Telle would set the time and location of the execution. It’s unclear how soon that might happen, but Army Lawyer magazine reported in May that the president’s approval of a death sentence was the start of a potentially lengthy post-appeal legal process.
A military execution consists of putting to death a member of the United States armed forces. Hasan was a U.S. Army major who became radicalized and turned his gun on his comrades at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009. He was sentenced to death in 2013 following a court martial.
The development comes less than a week after the botched execution in Tennessee of Christa Pike, who was hospitalized in critical condition after two doses of pentobarbital failed to kill her on September 30. The botched execution shines a spotlight on the lethal injection method, which accounts for the vast majority of botched executions in the United States.
Some states turned to firing squads as a response, and the failure to execute Pike might have helped federal officials choose that method, said Bernard Harcourt of Columbia Law School, who is writing a book about a botched lethal injection in Alabama involving an inmate he represented.
“Part of me thinks it might be a Tennessee effect,” Harcourt told USA TODAY. “They just want to stay away from lethal injection because the method seems so flawed right now.”
It was not immediately clear Monday when the last military execution by firing squad took place, although it appears to have occurred during World War II, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The Air Force Times reports that it was on January 31, 1945 that a U.S. Army firing squad executed Pvt. Eddie Slovik for desertion.
Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime and courts reporter covering the death penalty, cold cases and breaking news for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat
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