It was not so long ago that I thought American executions should be televised. In 2001, in the run-up to the execution of Timothy McVeigh, a domestic terrorist who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people, I wrote that his “execution, indeed all executions, should be televised. If America is going to continue to use the death penalty,” I added that “it should neither be shrouded in mystery nor hidden from view.”
All that changed on Oct. 8, when Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the Pentagon intended to livestream the execution by firing squad of another domestic terrorist, Nadal Hasan, who killed 13 soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009. As Hegseth explained: “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.”
On Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin defended Hegseth’s plan and echoed his words.
“I think people need to understand, if you attack America,” Mullin insisted, “we will come after you, and we will make sure that the punishment fits the crime.” He called Hasan a “scumbag,” saying, “I give absolutely zero thought to the way that this man dies.” Mullin also asserted that the public execution of Hasan would be part of President Donald Trump’s commitment to “restoring American values.”
Political leaders and citizens should see Hegseth’s plan for what it is: a new attempt to use public displays of cruelty as a tool of governance.
Coming from a high-ranking public official, that statement is as chilling as it is heartless. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, which requires the government to give a lot of thought to the way it punishes or executes anyone.
Hearing Hegseth’s and Mullins’ words was a stark reminder of how, in the wrong hands, public executions could be used as a tool to terrorize, not inform, a population. We’ve seen that in Iran, which hoists people up on cranes in the public square and lets them hang for the Iranian public to see. Filming those executions is a regular part of its process.
In this country, at this moment, political leaders and citizens should see Hegseth’s plan for what it is: a new attempt to use public displays of cruelty as a tool of governance.
Twenty-five years ago, McVeigh wanted the world to witness the moment when the federal government put him to death, but he did not get his way. At the time, advocating for televising executions was not the kind of thing that either capital punishment’s supporters or opponents wanted to hear.
The former worried it would become the kind of gruesome spectacle that would offend American sensibilities. Abolitionists feared that televising executions would excite a kind of bloodlust in those who saw them. And people on both sides of the death penalty debate, I argued, found “the prospect of watching executions ghoulish, and worry that televising them would create an unacceptable, public spectacle.”
My own position was different.
I wrote that “the question of whether executions should be televised is more than just a question of manners and taste … it is also a question of democracy.” Executions are public events, since the government is acting in our name, and like any other such event, the public should have a right to see what it does.
The courts have never agreed with me that the Constitution recognizes such a right or requires states or the federal government to televise executions. The most important legal precedent is a 1977 case called Garret v. Estelle.
In that case, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that Texas could prohibit a news cameraman from filming executions for a television broadcast. As the court put it, “Televising an execution would amount to conducting a public execution.” And it is up to the states to decide how their executions are conducted.
The prospect of livestreaming Hasan’s execution is of a piece with the Trump administration’s deployment of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the streets of American cities and their inexplicable use of force against innocent civilians.
Throughout much of American history, states chose to conduct executions in public. They did so because they believed public executions played an important role in conveying a moral message about sin and repentance. A key element was that the condemned were invited to deliver a “gallows speech” during which they could confess and point out the error of their ways to the assembled crowd.
However, the United States has not carried out a public execution in 90 years. As The Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig explained, “Public executions ceased … because politicians in the 19th century associated them with proletarian barbarity … (T)hey were mostly entertainment and did not always provoke the desired reactions.”
When I wrote about televising executions, I envisioned a solemn occasion during which officials in charge would respect the dignity of the condemned, not the entertainment that Bruenig described.
Truth be told, in the intervening 25 years, I hadn’t thought a lot about that argument. After McVeigh, few death row inmates asked to have their final moments broadcast, and addressing other aspects of capital punishment seemed more important.
But now things seem different.
What Hegseth wants to do has little to do with democracy and much to do with instilling fear in the American public — fear of an administration that seems capable of taking life and inflicting cruelty on anyone who gets in its way with no shame.
The prospect of livestreaming Hasan’s execution is of a piece with the Trump administration’s deployment of masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the streets of American cities and their inexplicable use of force against innocent civilians. Far from being embarrassed by the circulation of cellphone videos of those incidents, they amplified the Trump administration’s message that it would play by its own rules in dealing with its “enemies.”
Or take the 2025 American airstrikes on boats off the Venezuelan coast. The Pentagon was eager to disseminate video of those strikes, which killed many people.
Using video to display lethality or to achieve a PR purpose is not what I had in mind when I thought that televising executions would be a good thing to do.
Some people might, as Bruenig speculated, “enjoy the spectacle of a public execution,” while others might have “entirely different impressions — that the death penalty is a disgusting violation of human rights that puts America in league with nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China.”
Mullin dismissed such concerns.
“No one,” he said, “has to watch it if they don’t choose to.”
Today, just as I did 25 years ago, I do not think that the question of whether to televise executions should be resolved by thinking about whether anyone would watch or how those who did might react to seeing them. My mistake was not foreseeing that televising executions might someday be used by an administration that wants to subvert rather than preserve American democracy.
The post I used to be in favor of public executions. Pete Hegseth and Markwayne Mullin changed my mind. appeared first on MS NOW.
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