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On Thursday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the military will execute Nidal Hasan by firing squad (NBC News). Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people and injuring 32 at Fort Hood in 2009, will be the first military execution since 1961. It will also be the first time the U.S. government has broadcast an execution live on the internet (Spokesman-Review).
The news brought backlash from political leaders in both parties. Sen. Lisa Murkowski said she "would expect this from terrorists and dictators, but not here in America" (The Hill). Sen. Thom Tillis called the livestream "beyond disgusting" and said, "It should not be happening in America" (Spokesman-Review). This decision tells us a lot about where this administration wants to take us.
Public executions are a significant part of our nation's history. The 19th century was littered with public lynchings and hangings that were held in town squares and drew crowds who brought food and sold postcards. In December 1862, the U.S. government hanged 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota, in front of 4,000 spectators, which is considered the largest mass execution in U.S. history (MPR News). Records later showed that two of those men were hanged by mistake, including one who had already been acquitted.
The last public execution in the U.S. was held in 1936. Rainey Bethea, a young Black man convicted of rape, was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky, before 10,000 to 20,000 people (Mother Jones). The national press covered it as if it were a carnival, which embarrassed Kentucky so much that it outlawed public executions just two years later.
But public executions have still been happening since then. For some communities in the U.S., they never stopped. More than 4,000 Black people were lynched between 1877 and 1950. Just like state-sanctioned executions, many of these lynchings were public spectacles attended by thousands of white people, including elected officials (Equal Justice Initiative). Vendors sold food and postcards of the scene.
Beyond this, it's hard not to consider the killings carried out by ICE and the horror of police brutality as part of an unstated public lynching campaign, where the government has allowed its people to die at its own hands.
In her book Lynching and Spectacle, historian Amy Louise Wood argues that the spectacle is part of the violence. She shows how lynching was normalized and used to set new rules and expectations for individuals and communities. She goes further, writing that "the cultural power of lynching – indeed, the cultural power of white supremacy itself – rested on spectacle." To Wood, the people in those crowds were witnesses who "beheld or experienced [lynching] with active engagement."
The most insidious part of normalizing this kind of violence at an institutional level is how it will affect the way we treat each other. These spectacles enthrall us and push us to treat one another with the same callousness. They encourage us to use surveillance technology and the anonymity of the internet to be cruel. We must stand against public executions for the sake of our democracy and our communities, and to protect dignity and decency in our neighborhoods and beyond. Otherwise, I’m afraid of who we will become if we let ourselves treat these spectacles like a pastime once again.
Sources: NPR, NY1, Courthouse News, NBC News, Spokesman-Review, The Hill, MPR News, Mother Jones, Equal Justice Initiative, UNC Press, Washington Post, Amnesty International, AAIHS.
