Fort Hood Killer Nidal Hasan To Face Firing Squad in December for 2009 Attack

The man found responsible for the deadliest terror attack on a U.S. military base, Nidal Hasan, will be executed by firing squad on December 3 at Fort Hood, the scene of his 2009 crime that killed 13 unarmed soldiers and injured 32 more. It will be the first time the firing squad has been employed by the military since World War II.The new commandant of the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Colonel Andrew Sergent, who was appointed to the post in August, received his orders Tuesday from the acting secretary of the Army, Adam Telle. President Trump authorized the use of the firing squad last Friday.Rules for Hasan’s execution are yet to be written, according to a Defense Department spokesman. They’ll be decided by the Mr. Telle and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in the coming weeks.Previous procedures for executing a member of the military were last updated in 1959, just before the government’s last military execution, a hanging in 1961. The rules for “Execution by Musketry” written in the procedural manual call for an execution party to be composed of an officer, eight men, and a sergeant, with the subject of the execution secured to a post erected for the purpose.“Eight rifles (are) to be loaded in his presence. At least one but no more than three will be loaded with blank ammunition,” reads the document dating from the Eisenhower administration. A chaplain and a medical officer are to be present.The prisoner will have time to make a final statement to the chaplain. With a black hood over his head and typically a white “four-inch round target” over his heart, the prisoner will hear the officer in charge say, “Ready. Aim. Fire,” at which time the eight men will discharge their weapons, a single shot each.Finally, the medical officer and the officer in charge will examine the prisoner. If he is still alive, the sergeant of the execution party will administer a coup de grȃce, a final pistol shot to the head, “holding the muzzle just above the ear and one foot from the head.”Similar procedures were last carried out when a convicted deserter, Army Private Eddie Slovik, was shot by a 12-man firing squad in France on January 31, 1945. Ten men were executed by the U.S. military by firing squad during World War II. Slovik was the only soldier executed for desertion since the Civil War when firing squad executions were common.Three other men sitting on the military’s death row could also face the punishment. Ronald Gray is a former Army specialist convicted in 1988 for multiple murders and rapes near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Hasan Akbar is a former Army sergeant sentenced to death in 2005 for a grenade and rifle attack in Kuwait that killed two officers. Timothy Hennis is a former Army master sergeant sentenced to death in 2010 for a 1985 triple murder in North Carolina.The Supreme Court approved firing squads in the 19th century case of Wilkerson v. Utah filed to address the question of whether such executions were “cruel and unusual punishment.”The high court unanimously ruled in 1878 that it was better than the alternatives such as being “embowelled alive, beheaded, and quartered … public dissection … and burning alive,” the court wrote in a more than 100-page decision. “A case can be made that death by firing squad is likely to be subject to fewer problems than alternate forms of execution,” University of Albany Criminology Professor James R. Acker, who studied the matter, told The New York Sun.

Fort Hood Killer Nidal Hasan To Face Firing Squad in December for 2009 Attack

Fort Hood Killer Nidal Hasan To Face Firing Squad in December for 2009 Attack

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