When Justice Starts Looking Like the Crime

There is a specific moral rot that sets in when people convince themselves that justice looks like a digital pay-per-view event.

Pete Hegseth recently announced that Nidal Hasan, the former Army major who murdered 13 people and wounded more than 30 others at Fort Hood in 2009, is scheduled to die before a military firing squad this December. But the administration didn't stop there. Hegseth made it clear that he wants the execution to be public, and the Pentagon subsequently confirmed the plan is to livestream the entire event. The justification offered was simple: people need to watch it so they understand there are "serious consequences."

Let's call this what it actually is: grotesque theater.

The notion that an ideological mass murderer is going to be deterred by the presence of a broadcast feed is delusional. But far worse than the strategic naivety is the instinct driving it. The urge to broadcast the state-sanctioned destruction of a human body should turn the stomach of anyone who claims to value the principles of human dignity or basic civilized order. We do not get to abandon our principles simply because someone else committed an atrocity. That is not how principles work.

Outside of the complete disregard for the inherent value of human life, capital punishment fails every test of sound governance. It does not deter violent crime. It traps victims’ families in decades of appellate purgatory. It costs taxpayers exponentially more than permanent solitary confinement. And fundamentally, it misunderstands real justice. The most severe, fitting punishment for someone like Hasan is not a dramatic, high-profile exit. It is locking him in a concrete box, stripped of an audience and stripped of relevance, left to sit in total obscurity until his heart stops on its own.

Taking that power and turning it into an online broadcast drags our entire culture backward into barbarism. The United States abandoned public hangings nearly a century ago not out of sympathy for criminals, but because gathering crowds to watch men die degrades the people watching. It does not foster respect for the rule of law. It feeds a voyeuristic cruelty that treats the deliberate killing of a person as spectator sport.

Setting up cameras to stream a firing squad is not accountability. It is state-sponsored exhibitionism designed to pander to our lowest, most vengeful impulses. It is also an act of profound tactical stupidity. Hasan has spent years seeking martyrdom. He wanted a grand, radical finale to his narrative. Broadcasting his death hands him an international platform, a permanent digital archive, and recruitment propaganda for bad actors around the world. We are offering a terrorist the spotlight on the public dime.

The reflexive defense of this spectacle is always predictable: “Why should we care about his dignity when he showed none to his victims?”

Because our standards are not dictated by murderers.

Human dignity is not a privilege the government grants to citizens who behave themselves; it is an absolute boundary on what the state is permitted to do to any human being under its control. The moment you argue that a heinous crime gives the government permission to discard restraint and behave brutally in return, you have surrendered the moral high ground entirely. You have conceded the premise that cruelty is fine, so long as the target is unpopular enough.

A strong society proves its resolve through ruthless adherence to restraint. We hold trials, we demand evidence, we lock dangerous people away forever, and we refuse to become debased in the process. Hasan deserves to be locked away from the sunlight and entirely forgotten. What this nation does not need, and what our conscience cannot afford, is a government-produced snuff film masquerading as justice.