President Donald Trump has approved the execution of convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan by U.S. Army firing squad, moving the military toward carrying out a death sentence for the first time in 65 years — with CBS News reporting the execution is set for December 3 at Fort Hood, the same post where the 2009 attack took place.
The Pentagon announced the decision on Monday, October 5. Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the execution by firing squad was recommended by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and signed off on by President Trump. "Judgement day for Hasan has finally come," Parnell wrote in a post on X. Hegseth shared the announcement with a one-word comment: "Justice."
According to CBS News, families of the victims were told in an email that the execution is scheduled for December 3 and will take place at Fort Hood, Texas — the post where Hasan opened fire. Acting Army Secretary Adam Telle is responsible for setting the official time and place of the execution.
Hasan, a former Army major and psychiatrist, killed 13 people and wounded 32 others in the November 5, 2009 attack — one of the deadliest mass shootings ever on a U.S. military installation. He opened fire inside a crowded soldier processing center at Fort Hood where unarmed soldiers were preparing to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan. Those killed included 12 active-duty soldiers and one civilian; Pentagon officials have described Hasan, who shouted "Allahu Akbar" during the attack, as a terrorist.
At his 2013 court-martial, Hasan represented himself and acknowledged he was the shooter, saying he acted to protect Islamic insurgents from U.S. military forces. He called no witnesses and made no attempt to deny the charges, and his court-appointed standby attorneys expressed concern that he was deliberately seeking a death sentence. The military jury convicted him of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder and sentenced him to death.
Since then, Hasan has been held on military death row at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. His final appeal against the sentence failed in early 2025, clearing one of the last legal barriers to the execution moving forward.
The U.S. military has not carried out an execution since 1961, when Army Pvt. John Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth for the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old girl, according to data kept by the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. The firing squad itself has an even longer gap in military use: this would be the first U.S. military execution by firing squad since 1945.
Signs that the freeze was ending began surfacing months ago. In June, ABC News reported that the Army was preparing plans to resume executions if Trump granted approval. Hegseth had pressed for the decision for roughly a year, telling the Washington Examiner last September that he was fully committed to seeing the death penalty carried out in the case.
The choice of method carries significance beyond this case. Death by firing squad was one of several forms of capital punishment the Trump administration recently added to permissible forms of execution for the gravest of federal crimes, along with electrocution and gas asphyxiation — an expansion driven in part by growing difficulties in obtaining drugs for lethal injections.
That debate sharpened less than a week before the announcement, when Tennessee officials botched the scheduled lethal injection of Christa Pike on September 30, leaving her alive but hospitalized — the kind of failure that has pushed both states and the federal government to look again at older methods. Firing squads remain rare in the United States; only a handful of states authorize them as a backup method, and the military's choice of a firing squad — rather than the lethal injection used in federal civilian executions — underscores the symbolic weight the administration is attaching to the case.
The approval comes as Trump continues to position his administration as aggressively pro-death penalty in both civilian and military justice. The White House has supported expanding the use of capital punishment, and the president's campaign-era promises included faster and broader use of the death penalty for violent crime.
Legal observers expect Hasan's attorneys to pursue any remaining avenues of review before the sentence is carried out, even with the December 3 date now reported. Army Lawyer magazine reported in May that a president's approval of a death sentence is the beginning of a potentially lengthy post-appellate court process — meaning the final legal chapter of the Fort Hood case may not yet be written.