(Photo by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash)
There have been so many outrageous horrors from the Trump administration that it has been impossible to chronicle and comment on them all, but one of the latest ones has sparked a lot of public discussion, so I wanted to post about it.
Last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the execution of Nidal Hasan, who was found guilty in the shooting at Fort Hood in 2009 by a military tribunal, would be livestreamed for the public. The plan is that Hasan will be executed by military firing squad at Fort Hood on Dec. 3rd. Adding to the horror is that fact that Hasan is paralyzed from the waist down, a result of the police response to the shooting, and uses a wheelchair.
I have opposed the death penalty since I was a child on moral grounds and my church and many other faith-based and human rights groups also publicly oppose it as an affront to human dignity. It has been shown not to be a deterrent to crime. There is also the fear that, because Hasan was motivated by Muslim radicalization, Islamist extremist groups would use his public execution as a rallying point to recruit more members and carry out attacks.
We also should not look at suffering, pain, and death as entertainment. Part of the reason that there have not been public executions in the United States since the 1930s was that they sometimes turned into public spectacle, echoing history such as the
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