On a summer morning in 1936, thousands of people packed the streets of Owensboro, Kentucky, to watch a man hang. Rainey Bethea had been convicted of rape and murder, and his execution drew a crowd that treated it like a circus. Vendors sold hot dogs and drinks near the gallows. “Spectators jeered throughout, even while Bethea prayed,” legal historian Stuart Banner writes in The Death Penalty: An American History. In its aftermath, the condemnation of the affair by newspapers effectively ended the practice of public execution in America, with the press widely denouncing the spectacle as a “carnival of sadism.”
Nearly 90 years later, the federal government is preparing one. On December 3, Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who murdered 14 people at Fort Hood in 2009, will be executed by firing squad at the same base. And, the Pentagon says, the world will be able to watch online.
On November 5, 2009, Hasan, then an Army major, entered the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Texas, bowed his head in prayer, shouted “Allahu Akbar,” and then opened fire with a semiautomatic pistol. Among the dead were a pregnant woman and her unborn child. Another 32 were wounded. Hasan was apprehended after a firefight that left him paralyzed from the waist down. At his court martial, he admitted to the murders, saying that before the attack, he had been “on the wrong side [of] America’s war on Islam,” and that he was “an imperfect Muslim trying to establish the perfect religion of Almighty God as supreme on the land despite the disbeliever’s hatred for it.” On August 28, 2013, he was sentenced to death, a sentence stalled for 13 years by appeals and the need for presidential approval.