On December 3, a firing squad will execute Nidal Hasan at the Fort Hood military base in Texas. It was at the base that Hasan - a 56-year-old former Army psychiatrist and major - shot and killed 13 people and injured about 30 others in a 2009 attack.
"We will make sure that people can watch it, that it happens publicly," said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to the conservative television channel Real America's Voice.
Pentagon sources have made it clear to several media outlets that the execution will be televised live.
Sweden's foreign minister, Maria Malmer Stenergard, says the death penalty is inhumane and irreversible.
"We oppose the death penalty everywhere, in all contexts, and of course this too. I cannot be clearer," Malmer Stenergard tells TT.
“Could be a good idea”
Hasan was convicted of several murders and attempted murders by a military court, and the execution will be the first carried out by the US military since 1961. The court had ruled that he would be executed by lethal injection, but US President Donald Trump intervened earlier this week and ordered a firing squad.
The last public executions in the United States took place in the 1930s, when crowds gathered to watch two criminals being hanged in Kentucky and Missouri, respectively.
The fact that an execution takes place in public is in a way positive in this context, says law professor and death penalty expert Deborah Denno of Fordham University.
"I think it could be a good idea, because it would be transparent and the public would be fully aware of what is happening," she tells AP.
The only places known to have carried out public executions in recent times are Iran and Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
Failed injection
The death penalty is the subject of renewed ethical debate in the United States.
Last week, there was a high-profile attempt to execute murderer Christa Pike in Tennessee. She was injected with two doses of the lethal drug pentobarbital behind closed doors, but survived and woke up in hospital a few days later.
In that context, execution by firing squad can be seen as more precise and less inhumane, according to experts who spoke to AP.
Nidal Hasan has the opportunity to appeal and have his execution at least postponed.
Corrected: An earlier version of this text contained an incorrect statement about what Nidal Hasan was convicted of.
The United States is the only Western democracy that regularly carries out the death penalty.
Twenty-seven states retain the death penalty, four of which do not apply it. In addition, federal courts can impose the death penalty for certain crimes.
Twenty-three states have abolished the death penalty.
Since the United States reinstated the death penalty in 1977, 1,683 people had been executed as of September 29 this year. Texas accounts for 602 of those executions.
As of July 1 this year, 1,973 prisoners were on death row. As of September 29, 29 death row inmates had been executed this year.
Source: Death Penalty Information Center (DPI)
