On January 20, 2025, President Trump directed the Department to once again faithfully implement the laws that authorize capital punishment. In Executive Order 14164, the President recognized that “[c]apital punishment is an essential tool for deterring and punishing those who would commit the most heinous crimes and acts of lethal violence against American citizens.”

          Restoring and Strengthening the Federal Death Penalty U.S. Department of Justice

Whether we want to admit it or not, the Trumpian Age is a time of barbarism. Extrajudicial executions of alleged drug runners on speed boats. Cage fights on the White House lawn. Missile strikes on Iranian military and civilian (collateral damage) targets in a congressionally unauthorized war under the auspices of preserving global security and under the guise of nonproliferation. The “surgical law enforcement operation,” Donald Trump’s words, to arrest Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for drug trafficking and human rights violations, which include the torture of his opponents and U.S. citizens. Mass arrests, confinement, and deportation without legal representation of immigrants. The intimidation and murder of citizens protesting ICE activities. Under Trump, the rule of law has eroded significantly, and justice has become politicized.

Broadcast media outlets have been complicit in trivializing national and international news coverage of these stories.  As reported in Nature, the media focus is on sensationalism—the “strategic use of dramatic framing, emotionally charged language, and striking imagery to amplify audience attention”—and biased opinions that do not inform the public. Citizens are fed sensationalism, politainment, and infotainment. https://www.nature.com/nature-index/topics/l4/sensationalism-in-news-media-content

And now for our entertainment, the planned livestream broadcast of the execution of Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan by a firing squad scheduled for 3 December.

The Department of Justice’s Restoring and Strengthening the Federal Death Penalty notes that the first execution by firing squad took place in 1608 in the Virginia Jamestown colony. The question of whether this method was cruel and unusual punishment, and therefore should be prohibited, was addressed 271 years later. In Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130 (1879), the Court ruled unanimously that execution by firing squad does not violate and is consistent with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/99/130/

Wilkerson v. Utah, 99 U.S. 130 (1879) was a civilian, not a military judicial case. Wallace Wilkerson shot and killed William Baxter in a dispute over a game of cribbage on 22 November 1877.  Wilkerson was found guilty of premeditated murder by a jury of his peers. Hasan was found guilty by a military court of the premeditated murder of 13 soldiers and the attempted murder of 32 soldiers who were wounded at Fort Hood, Texas, on 5 November 2009.

Hasan’s court-martial for his heinous crime raises Constitutional law questions of whether the Eighth Amendment is applicable to a military capital case in peacetime. Those issues need to be resolved by Congress and the Supreme Court to address civil and military law as it pertains to the death penalty and the methods used to carry out the sentence.

The Eighth Amendment reads, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

Legal scholars and Supreme Court justices have debated the question “Does the imposition and carrying out of the death penalty constitute cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Constitutional law?” (e.g. Weems v. United States 217 U.S 349 (1910), Williams v. New York, 337 U.S. 241 (1949,), Furman v. Georgia, 408 U. S. 238 (1972), Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976), Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407 (2008). The question has been left unresolved.

The Sixth Amendment provides that, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed. . . .”

However, an unaddressed negative conflict exists between the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. According to the Fifth Amendment, military personnel are excluded from the right to a grand jury. The Fifth Amendment reads: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment of indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger.”

In their book Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner observe that in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557, 578 (2006), Congress, while excluding military personnel from the grand jury requirement in the Fifth Amendment, notably neglected to include this statutory provision in the Sixth Amendment (pages 107-111).

The military justice system operates under a different jurisdiction. Military law is more stringent, inclusive, and rigid than civilian law. The Uniform Code of Military Justice does not automatically grant military defendants the guarantees established in the Bill of Rights, though they share many of the same rights as civilians. However, as Robert F. Holland observes, “…unlike jurors for civilian criminal trials, military jurors are not randomly selected for that duty. Instead, military jurors are designated to participate in a particular court-martial by the same senior commander who referred the allegations to the court-martial for trial.” (“Improving Criminal Jury Verdicts: Learning from the Court-Martial,” 97 J. Criminal Law & Criminology 101, 115 (2006) https://www.jstor.org/stable/40042823?seq=1)

This undermines the reliability and impartiality of the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendment criteria.

I believe Hasan is guilty of committing homicide and attempted murder. His crime, an act of terrorism, is despicable and condemnable. What are Trump’s, Hegseth’s, and our own expectations of Hasan’s execution? One can ask the same question of the Christa Pike sentence (and the botched execution). Regardless of the capital case, whether civilian or military, “…punishment is justified under one or more of three principal rationales: rehabilitation, deterrence, and retribution” Harmelin v. Michigan, 501 U. S. 957, 999 (1991) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/501/957/.

The corruption of the Trump Administration, the willingness to push against the boundaries of the legal restraints of presidential powers, leads me to conclude that the intent behind Hasan’s public execution is retributive “justice.” The decision for a public execution is about taking pleasure in brutality. Trump, Hegseth, and others willfully ignore “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Trop, 356 U. S., at 101 Kennedy v. Louisiana, 554 U.S. 407 (2008).” https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/407/

Let us keep in mind that “When the law punishes by death, it risks its own sudden descent into brutality, transgressing the constitutional commitment to decency and restraint.” https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/407/

When Is Justice Reduced to Retribution and Barbarism?©2026 Charles van Heck