Don’t livestream the Fort Hood execution
The Issue
Summary: Whatever your view of the death penalty, broadcasting this execution would cause real moral and physical harm to soldiers, survivors, and children. We ask the President not to allow it, and Congress to bar federal funds for broadcasting any execution.
Addressed to: the President; Secretary Hegseth; and the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.
On December 3 at 1 p.m., the Army plans to execute Nidal Hasan by firing squad at Fort Hood. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the execution will be livestreamed. It would be the first known live broadcast of an execution in the United States.
This letter is led by clinicians and open to anyone who agrees. We as Americans hold a range of views on capital punishment, and this letter does not address the death penalty, which we believe requires review. This objection is narrower, and it is clinical: broadcasting his death would injure people who had no part in his crime.
Soldiers who will be ordered to fire. Execution procedures are designed to insulate the people who carry them out from the weight of what they are doing. Studies of execution-team officers find they cope through dissociation and by spreading responsibility across the team. Those protections only partly work. Clinicians who treat service members call the resulting harm moral injury: lasting damage from taking part in an act that violates one's deepest moral beliefs. No American service member has ever carried out an execution broadcast live. We would be stripping away protections we already know are inadequate, and turning the act into a permanent public record and permanent human damage.
Audience. A broadcast cannot be limited to adults who choose to watch it. Clips will be cut, shared, and autoplayed for years. And choosing to watch does not protect the viewer. Brain-imaging studies find that seeing another person in pain engages part of the same network that processes one’s own pain. After the Boston Marathon bombing, six or more hours a day of media exposure that week predicted more acute stress than being at the bombing itself. In later work, how often people saw graphic images predicted post-traumatic stress symptoms and poorer functioning six months on, independent of how much coverage they watched. These links hold even among people with no prior mental health problems. When ISIS released its beheading videos, about one in five adults in a national sample watched at least part of one. Those who did reported more distress and fear about two years later. The harm reaches the body, too. After 9/11, among Americans who mostly saw the attacks on television, high acute stress was associated with a 53% higher rate of heart and blood-pressure problems over the next three years. Separately, four or more hours a day of early 9/11 coverage, along with acute stress, predicted more physician-diagnosed health problems two to three years later. Children are not spared: schoolchildren in London who saw the 9/11 attacks only on television reported intrusive images and post-traumatic stress symptoms six months afterward.
Alonzo Lunsford, who was shot seven times at Fort Hood, put it more plainly. He does not want this to be "some pay-per-view event," and he worries about children watching.
Finally, a broadcast death does not end when the person dies. Hasan has long cast himself as a religious warrior. A video of his killing by the government he attacked is exactly the material extremist recruiters can replay indefinitely. Separately, research on mass killings has found that high-profile violent events appear to cluster in time, with risk elevated for about two weeks after each one. Those researchers are careful not to claim proof of cause, and an execution is not a mass shooting. But no one can show the opposite: that putting a state killing in front of millions of viewers is safe. That burden belongs to those who want to broadcast it.
Nothing about justice requires a livestream. Army rules already provide for witnesses, including victims' families, the prisoner's lawyer, and members of the news media. Families who want to see the sentence carried out can. The public can be told it was done. No American execution has been public since 1936, for good reason.
We ask the President not to permit this execution to be broadcast, and we ask Congress to bar federal funds from being used to broadcast any execution. The damage would live on. We ask our leaders to spare the country that wound. A livestream would kill part of our humanity, and put us in the company of Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea. That is not who we are. We ask our leaders not to make it who we become.
Dr. Laura Kelly, DAOM, Dipl. OM
19
The Issue
Summary: Whatever your view of the death penalty, broadcasting this execution would cause real moral and physical harm to soldiers, survivors, and children. We ask the President not to allow it, and Congress to bar federal funds for broadcasting any execution.
Addressed to: the President; Secretary Hegseth; and the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.
On December 3 at 1 p.m., the Army plans to execute Nidal Hasan by firing squad at Fort Hood. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the execution will be livestreamed. It would be the first known live broadcast of an execution in the United States.
This letter is led by clinicians and open to anyone who agrees. We as Americans hold a range of views on capital punishment, and this letter does not address the death penalty, which we believe requires review. This objection is narrower, and it is clinical: broadcasting his death would injure people who had no part in his crime.
Soldiers who will be ordered to fire. Execution procedures are designed to insulate the people who carry them out from the weight of what they are doing. Studies of execution-team officers find they cope through dissociation and by spreading responsibility across the team. Those protections only partly work. Clinicians who treat service members call the resulting harm moral injury: lasting damage from taking part in an act that violates one's deepest moral beliefs. No American service member has ever carried out an execution broadcast live. We would be stripping away protections we already know are inadequate, and turning the act into a permanent public record and permanent human damage.
Audience. A broadcast cannot be limited to adults who choose to watch it. Clips will be cut, shared, and autoplayed for years. And choosing to watch does not protect the viewer. Brain-imaging studies find that seeing another person in pain engages part of the same network that processes one’s own pain. After the Boston Marathon bombing, six or more hours a day of media exposure that week predicted more acute stress than being at the bombing itself. In later work, how often people saw graphic images predicted post-traumatic stress symptoms and poorer functioning six months on, independent of how much coverage they watched. These links hold even among people with no prior mental health problems. When ISIS released its beheading videos, about one in five adults in a national sample watched at least part of one. Those who did reported more distress and fear about two years later. The harm reaches the body, too. After 9/11, among Americans who mostly saw the attacks on television, high acute stress was associated with a 53% higher rate of heart and blood-pressure problems over the next three years. Separately, four or more hours a day of early 9/11 coverage, along with acute stress, predicted more physician-diagnosed health problems two to three years later. Children are not spared: schoolchildren in London who saw the 9/11 attacks only on television reported intrusive images and post-traumatic stress symptoms six months afterward.
Alonzo Lunsford, who was shot seven times at Fort Hood, put it more plainly. He does not want this to be "some pay-per-view event," and he worries about children watching.
Finally, a broadcast death does not end when the person dies. Hasan has long cast himself as a religious warrior. A video of his killing by the government he attacked is exactly the material extremist recruiters can replay indefinitely. Separately, research on mass killings has found that high-profile violent events appear to cluster in time, with risk elevated for about two weeks after each one. Those researchers are careful not to claim proof of cause, and an execution is not a mass shooting. But no one can show the opposite: that putting a state killing in front of millions of viewers is safe. That burden belongs to those who want to broadcast it.
Nothing about justice requires a livestream. Army rules already provide for witnesses, including victims' families, the prisoner's lawyer, and members of the news media. Families who want to see the sentence carried out can. The public can be told it was done. No American execution has been public since 1936, for good reason.
We ask the President not to permit this execution to be broadcast, and we ask Congress to bar federal funds from being used to broadcast any execution. The damage would live on. We ask our leaders to spare the country that wound. A livestream would kill part of our humanity, and put us in the company of Iran, Afghanistan, and North Korea. That is not who we are. We ask our leaders not to make it who we become.
Dr. Laura Kelly, DAOM, Dipl. OM
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Petition created on October 9, 2026