Trump Approves Army’s First Execution by Firing Squad Since World War II

Donald Trump has authorized a firing squad in the case of convicted Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan. Hasan was convicted of killing 13 people and wounding dozens of others in the 2009 mass shooting in Texas. Rules and procedures for Malik’s execution are yet to be written, according to a DoD spokesman.New rules will be decided by the Secretary of the Army and Secretary of Defense as those in effect at the last Army firing squad were updated in 1959, just before the last military execution, a hanging, in 1961.Those rules for “Execution by Musketry” 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,” the document dating from the Eisenhower administration reads. There will be a chaplain and a medical officer present.The prisoner will have time to make a final statement to the chaplain. With a black hood over his head and (usually) a white “4-inch round target” over his heart, he’ll 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 grace,” 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 convicted deserter Army Pvt. 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 such executions were common. The first one is believed to have been in the War of 1812. Military records indicate no woman has ever faced a military firing squad.There are four men on the military’s death row, who could 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 following subsequent DNA evidence reviews.The men are housed at United States Disciplinary Barracks on Fort Leavenworth, Kansas where executions are expected to take place. Firing squads are not foolproof. In 1915, a Mexican military firing squad, including the last shot to the head, failed to kill one soldier who later went on American radio shows to talk about it. The sordid record of American firing squads bloody mishaps started with the first one officially authorized by the Supreme Court. That ended in a 27-minute gore-soaked struggle for life on a bright spring morning in 1879. Accounts of the most recent such executions say we still don’t have the method perfected. In that first case, things started to go sideways with a cutthroat game of cribbage in a saloon about 40 miles south of Provo. Gambling, booze and a grudge over a woman were involved. Then gun shots were fired.The Supreme took up the case of Wilkerson v. Utah to address the question of whether using a firing squad to execute a murderer was unconstitutional “cruel and unusual” punishment. Perhaps because exactly such affairs had been going on in the colonies since the 1600s, the court unanimously ruled 8-0 that it was sure better than the alternatives such as being “embowelled alive, beheaded, and quartered” as well as “public dissection …and burning alive,” the court wrote in a more than 100 page disquisition. Despite the ugly debut, “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 Sun. “I suppose it could be (and has been) argued that death by guillotine is more foolproof still.” As opposition to the death penalty rose in the 20th Century, public opinion pushed the states and federal government to adopt more clinical methods of execution such as the electric chair and lethal injection. Flash forward to today with drug companies under increasing pressure from anti-death penalty activists in the U.S. and overseas, more effective drugs for the neater lethal injection method are hard to come by. As a result, the firing squad was emerging as an alternative before Mr. Trump’s recent decision.In 2010, the first such 21st Century killing went better than Wilkerson’s, though there were still echoes of his case. That crime, too, involved a murderous encounter in a Utah drinking establishment. The five executioners, aiming at a target on his chest, fired and Ronnie Lee Gardner was declared dead two minutes later.Things went similarly well with Brad Sigmon, a man convicted of brutally mauling his ex-girlfriend’s parents as he beat them to death with a baseball bat. He successfully faced a South Carolina firing squad in 2025.Problems arose in the case of Mikal Mahdi, executed there weeks later. The killer of a police officer lived for four minutes as he bled to death. State “sharpshooters” missed his heart. One of them allegedly missed the restrained man altogether, though prison officials later claimed two bullets went through the same wound mysteriously leaving no sign of the third bullet in a later autopsy.History shows that no method of execution commonly used in the United States has been flawless. Hangings, firing squads, electrocutions, gas chambers and lethal injections have all gone wrong. That’s one reason advocates have pushed most states to either abandon the death penalty or put a moratorium on carrying it out.“I do not want to diminish the importance of doing whatever is possible to prevent executions that risk prolonged and painful death,” Professor Acker, who wrote about the death penalty and Wilkerson’s case, said. But that “distracts from the far more fundamental question of whether death should be imposed in any case as a punishment for crimes.” Still, he said, “perhaps a return to firing squad executions, which have an impressive historical pedigree, may be thought of as a modest form of progress” in the sense that “the firing squad and the guillotine require visceral confrontation with executions in ways that the less dramatically visible method of causing death by lethal injection does not.”Going back to the Civil War it is just that visceral reaction that fueled Confederate and Union Army commanders alike to make firing squads as public as possible, leaving wavering soldiers in fear of their officers’ wrath as much or more than enemy fire.

Trump Approves Army’s First Execution by Firing Squad Since World War II

Trump Approves Army’s First Execution by Firing Squad Since World War II

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