By Brad Lendon, Mary Kay Mallonee, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump has approved the use of a firing squad for the execution of Nidal Hasan, who was convicted of killing 13 people and wounding dozens of others in the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas. It would be the US Army’s first such execution of a soldier since World War II and its first imposition of any death penalty on an armed service member in 65 years.
The Pentagon announced Monday night that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recommended death by firing squad for Hasan and Trump approved it.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell posted on X that Hegseth will set the time and place of the execution for “the jihadist who opened fire on unarmed American soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009.”
“He killed 13 people and wounded 32 others while shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ during the attack,” Parnell said. “Judgement day for Hasan has finally come.”
Hegseth replied to Parnell’s post, saying, “Justice.”
Hasan, a US Army major and psychiatrist, was convicted in July 2013 of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted murder by a jury panel of 13 officers, which unanimously recommended his death sentence.
He admitted in court he was the gunman of the Nov. 5, 2009, shooting, and apologized for “any mistakes.”
A US-born citizen of Palestinian descent, Hasan said he was targeting soldiers he was set to deploy with to Afghanistan and wanted to protect the Taliban and its leaders from the US military.
“There was adequate provocation that these were deploying soldiers that were going to engage in an illegal war,” Hasan told the military judge at his trial.
Hasan first walked into a processing center at Ford Hood and opened fire on troops gathered there for final medical checks for their deployment. As the troops tried to flee outside, Hasan followed them out the back door where he confronted police.
He was arrested after an exchange of gunfire with two officers, Senior Sgt. Mark Todd and Sgt. Kim Munley, during which Hasan was struck and fell to the ground.
According to testimony, Todd ran up, kicked Hasan’s gun away, turned him over on his stomach and searched him. That’s when he found the additional gun, extra ammunition magazines and a cell phone.
Army Criminal Investigation Division officer Duane Mitchell said 177 unexpended rounds were recovered from Hasan in both 30- and 20-round magazines. He also explained that he had two gunsights to help him shoot accurately: a red laser gunsight for low-light conditions and a second green laser, which is most effective in sunlight.
Hasan was paralyzed from the waist down from the wound that day and uses a wheelchair.
The last Army soldier executed by firing was Pvt. Eddie Slovik on January 31, 1945 – in the final months of World War II in Europe – after Slovik was found guilty of desertion by a military court.
The last US Army execution of any type was in 1961 at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas, when Pvt. John Bennett was hanged after he was convicted of raping and attempting to kill an 11-year-old Austrian girl.
Since 1916, the US military has executed 135 armed service members, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. There are 15 crimes that can be punishable by death, and any execution must be approved by the president, who also has the power to commute a death sentence.
Once the president approves, the method and date of execution are determined by the Secretary of the Army, according to a May 2026 article in the military’s Army Lawyer journal, adding that the execution date must fall within 60 to 150 days of the president’s approval.
CNN has reached out to the Pentagon for more information and clarity whether on the date and time would be set by the secretary of the Army or the defense secretary, as the department’s spokesperson said.
Convicted prisoners can still appeal a death sentence by filing a petition of habeus corpus, challenging the legality of their imprisonment, according to the article. Such a filing could lead to a stay of execution while the appeal makes its way through the legal system.
Besides Hasan, three other soldiers are on death row at Leavenworth, the Defense Department’s only maximum-security facility. All of them were found guilty of murder, among other offenses, according to Army Lawyer.
Pvt. Eddie Slovik was executed by a 12-member firing squad in France in 1945, the last US soldier known to face this method of capital punishment.
Slovik’s case has gotten significant attention since the war – among an estimated 50,000 American deserters in World War II, he was the only one executed.
The story was the premise of the 1974 TV movie, “The Execution of Private Slovik,” with Martin Sheen in the title role.
Journalist Charles Glass, author of the book “The Deserters,” said in a 2013 interview with NPR that Slovak “wasn’t a bad soldier; he just simply – he was afraid,” adding that Slovak turned himself in rather than flee.
His execution, while carried out in secret, was used as an example, according to Glass and the anti-death penalty non-profit Reprieve.
Officers of the military court that imposed the death penalty for Slovik didn’t expect it to be imposed, a 2020 article in Reprieve said. But then-supreme allied commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower approved the execution as an example to what could happen to deserters as the Battle of the Bulge was raging in Europe, according to Glass and Reprieve.
When Slovik was executed, only 11 members had bullets in their rifles so members of the squad would have psychological deniability in his death, according to the Reprieve report.
“They didn’t tell anybody about it, and they didn’t even tell his wife that he had been executed. They just said that he had died in Europe,” Glass said in the NPR interview.
“It wasn’t until a journalist named William Bradford Huie looked into the case and wrote about it, wrote a very good book about it in the mid-1950s, that it became public knowledge,” he said.
This story has been updated with additional information.
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