Audio By Carbonatix
President Trump was correct to nix Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s plan to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, the terrorist who, in 2009, murdered 13 people and an unborn child at Fort Hood in Texas. Hasan undoubtedly deserves to die. There is no question of his guilt, and his crime — joining a volunteer military to subvert it from the inside in the name of a foreign ideology — is of precisely the type for which the death penalty has historically been reserved. Nor does the fact that he is in a wheelchair — a condition that is the direct result of his murderous rampage — change his eligibility. But there is a difference between carrying out an execution and livestreaming an execution, and support for one does not necessitate support for the other. President Trump is right to draw the distinction he has.
Some observers have made the case that public executions help to convey the seriousness of some crimes. This is a defensible position in theory, but, in practice, it falls short. Certainly, executions should be “public” in the sense that the press and the victim’s families should be able to attend. But extending that offer to everyone or, worse still, livestreaming it over the internet is a different kettle of fish. It is true that the death penalty is often sanitized, and that this can serve to hide from the voters the nature of the grave action that’s being taken in their name. But, unlike with lethal injections, there is nothing sanitized about a firing squad, and one does not need to watch one on YouTube to comprehend the seriousness of the moment. As a matter of fact, most nations ended public executions precisely because they were not being treated as solemn and instructive affairs, but as an opportunity for bloodlust, or even cheap entertainment. Given the speed at which the very worst news is flippantly turned into memes these days, it seems clear how a livestreamed execution would be treated by its audience.
Other analysts have proposed that to disseminate film of Hasan’s execution would be to hand radical Islamic terrorists a useful recruiting tool. We are not persuaded that this is true, because we are not persuaded that radical Islamic terrorists need any more excuses to hate the United States. But, of course, that works both ways. If livestreaming an execution is unlikely to inspire radical Islamic terrorists to attack us, then it is also unlikely to deter them from doing so. Justifying his move, Secretary Hegseth suggested that it was important for the world “to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.” It’s doubtful that this would be the lesson. At the very least, whatever marginal benefit there might be in such a play, it seems almost certain that it would be offset by public disgust, and thereby that it would undermine the very effect that Hegseth hopes to achieve.
President Trump is a strange figure who vacillates between pursuing wildly unpopular fringe projects and exhibiting an intuitive understanding of mainstream public opinion. His refusal to permit a livestream execution falls into the latter camp, and, for that, we are grateful.