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Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell stated that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended the firing squad for Nidal Malik Hasan and that President Donald Trump approved the plan on October 5, 2026. Parnell added that Acting Secretary of the Army Adam R. Telle will set the time and place for the execution, which must occur no sooner than 60 days and within 150 days of approval under Army policy. “Judgement day for Hasan has finally come,” Parnell said in the announcement, to which Hegseth responded with the single word “Justice.” The development ends years of legal delays following the Supreme Court’s rejection of Hasan’s final appeal in March 2025.
Hasan, an Army psychiatrist at the time, opened fire inside the Soldier Readiness Processing Center at Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009, according to trial records detailed across multiple outlets including ABC News and NBC News. The former major killed 13 people, including 12 soldiers and one civilian Defense Department employee, while wounding 32 others as he shouted “Allahu Akbar.” An Army release at the time identified victims such as Lt. Col. Juanita L. Warman of Havre de Grace, Maryland, and Capt. John P. Gaffaney of San Diego, California, many of whom were preparing for deployment.
A general court-martial convicted Hasan in August 2013 on 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder, with a panel of 13 officers unanimously recommending the death penalty after he acknowledged his actions in court. The Virginia-born son of Palestinian immigrants had told the court he carried out the attack to defend the Taliban amid what he described as America’s war on Islam. Hasan has remained on military death row at the United States Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he is one of four inmates awaiting execution.
If the sentence is carried out it would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961, when Pvt. John Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth for the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old girl in Austria, according to data compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center. The firing squad method would mark the first such military execution since Pvt. Eddie Slovik was shot for desertion in France on January 31, 1945, during World War II, NBC News reported. Prior to 1991 military regulations listed hanging, electrocution or firing squad as approved methods, with the Secretary of the Army holding final discretion on the procedure today.
A 2012 study from the Death Penalty Information Center indicated that service members of color faced roughly twice the likelihood of receiving a death sentence compared with white defendants in military courts. Hasan is the only one of the four current military death row inmates to have received presidential approval for execution, with others including Ronald Gray and Hasan Karim Akbar still awaiting decisions. Army rules require at least two news organizations to witness any execution, which would take place at a federal facility in Terre Haute, Indiana, under current protocols.
The Fort Hood attack remains one of the deadliest mass shootings at a U.S. military installation, prompting widespread reviews of base security and radicalization risks within the armed forces. External assessments from the time, including those cited by The New York Times, highlighted how Hasan had been in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric linked to al-Qaeda. Officials have described the case as an act of terrorism, a classification that influenced the pursuit of the death penalty from the outset.
