The U.S. military plans to execute Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan by firing squad on Dec. 3, carrying out the first military execution since 1961. In 2009, Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, killed 13 people and wounded 32 others at the Texas military base, the very place where he will be put to death. In an unprecedented first, the rest of us have been invited to participate as viewers of a livestream of the execution.
There is no question about the horror of the crimes committed by Hasan. He was clear about his motives and did not deny his guilt. But there are important questions about how the military will carry out the execution and livestream it, in particular, and about the psychological impact on the many service members who will be asked to participate.
The psychological costs of participation in combat and exposure to violence and death are well known. But the costs don’t stop with post-traumatic stress, depression or anxiety. Service members must also bear the weight of the moral significance of their own actions, the actions of the units to which they belong, and the actions of those giving the orders. Moral injury describes the enduring distress that can follow experiences that violate a person’s deeply held moral commitments and disrupt how the individual understands themselves and the world. Importantly, moral injury does not necessarily require wrongdoing. It can result from cases of tragic necessity too, when a service member believes their actions are necessary, lawful, and justified yet still has trouble reconciling them with who they are and what they value.
Participating in an execution can be a potentially morally injurious event for service members, even when the execution is lawful, and even though they have been trained to kill when necessary. In combat, military necessity can justify lethal force. This isn’t to say that the person killed must be an immediate danger to anyone—they don’t need to be holding a weapon or actively engaged in combat to be viewed as an appropriate military target—but the threat does typically need to be considered ongoing. We do not typically consider a prisoner of war or otherwise controlled enemy combatants to be permissible targets. In an execution, the purpose of the kill is different. The state has complete control over the condemned. They are restrained and disarmed, and the risk of ongoing threat is no longer. This kill is undertaken to impose punishment, not to ensure safety.
This distinction does not settle whether capital punishment is morally permissible, and I do not intend to argue for or against the death penalty here. I highlight the distinction because it may matter enormously to the person required to carry out the sentence. Some service members may see carrying out an execution as aligned with their moral commitments. Others may not. Preserving agency—a person’s ability to decide what to do and act based on reasons they accept—is one way to protect service members from debilitating moral injury.
We do not yet know how the firing squad will be chosen, if they will recruit volunteers or order participation, but we do know that the military is a unique setting where freedom of choice is already tightly constrained. Military personnel routinely joke about being “volun-told” to participate in optional details. They regularly face strong institutional pressure to participate not only under orders, but when participation is suggested or encouraged. The military is a culture where compliance is valued. Service members trust those in positions of authority to lead them; they maintain loyalty to their units, and they fulfill all assigned duties regardless of their personal stance. This culture promotes cohesion and effectiveness, but it also is prone to moral injury when the action that is ordered is morally fraught.
Participation in the firing squad should require genuinely informed consent, agreement without coercion, the ability to change one’s mind and withdraw from participation at any time, and protection for those who choose not to participate from professional retaliation. Meaningful choice and consent cannot guarantee protection from moral injury. It does, however, respect service members as moral agents, allows them to consult their own moral commitments, and avoids adding compelled participation to the burdens they may already bear.
Another way to reduce the risk of moral injury is to rely on distributed moral responsibility, meaning all members participating in the kill carry the moral weight of the action. Execution procedures sometimes obscure which individual caused the death, and share the responsibility of killing across multiple participants to reduce individual distress. In firing squads, historically, at least one member of the detail would be given a blank, allowing participants uncertainty about whether they fired a lethal shot. Yet plausible deniability is no substitute for consent and meaningful choice.
Multiplying Moral Injury with a Livestream
In capital punishment cases, it is often argued that if the state claims authority to kill, then the citizens ought to see what the state is doing in its name. Public oversight is important to accountability. However, accountability requires that citizens have sufficient information to evaluate the state’s exercise of lethal power, not necessarily participate in the execution as witnesses.
A livestream might serve as transparency, but it also changes the act’s social meaning; a public stream turns the execution into something that can be watched, replayed, and circulated. This element adds an additional burden on those participating in the execution itself. Rather than performing the execution, the firing squad is also now performing for the public and cannot control how that performance will be received. Some will tune in out of morbid curiosity and to be part of the national conversation. Some will feel obligated to watch out of grief, protest, or in order to bear witness. Others will watch to celebrate or consume the event as entertainment.
The livestream also exponentially adds to the count of people who are at risk for moral injury. Beyond the firing squad, there will be videographers, sound techs, editors, the group planning the logistics, the communications personnel setting up and maintaining the broadcast, the public affairs teams, the technical support, the cleaning crew, and many more. It’s not just military police who will be participating, but any number of service members could be tasked to engage with this execution. These participants will be shouldering not only the weight of the execution itself, but also the knowledge that the graphic violence that they are exposed to in combat—often under the banner of protecting the American public from having to witness such violence—is being directly delivered to homes across the country, and they are the mechanism to make that possible.
The ripple effect of moral injury doesn’t just stop with the service members providing support for this livestream or participating in the execution itself. It also extends to their families. When a service member is wounded, be that a physical injury or an invisible wound such as PTSD or moral injury, their families are the ones who shoulder that burden. Military spouses and children become caregivers, and sometimes, become harmed themselves when their loved ones do not receive the treatment and support they need to heal.
The execution of Hasan is meant to be a means of delivering justice for the loss of 13 people, and the physical and emotional wounds to those who were there that day, as well as the rest of us who watched a member of the military turn his weapon on his own community. It is not meant to be a vehicle for exponentially more harm to those participating and those watching at home, and the risk of that outcome is high. The state has a special responsibility not to impose avoidable harm to those acting under its authority. Care must be exercised to give those participating in this execution a meaningful choice to participate or not and to minimize the risk of moral injury for those subjected to it.
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