The U.S. military has not carried out the death penalty since 1961. The Army secretary will decide a time and place for the execution, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell wrote in a post on X.
“Judgement day for Hasan has finally come,” Parnell wrote.
Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, walked into a medical building where soldiers were getting medical checkups, shouted “Allahu akbar” — Arabic for “God is great!” — and opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun. Thirteen unarmed people were killed and more than 30 injured.
He said it was an effort to stop them from going to Afghanistan and killing his fellow Muslims and made almost no effort to defend himself at trial. He told jurors that evidence would show he was the shooter and described himself as a soldier who had “switched sides.”
Trump’s approval triggers a series of procedural steps toward carrying out the execution, but Hasan could put them on hold — potentially for years — with a habeas corpus appeal in the civilian federal court system, according to an article published in May in the magazine Army Lawyer.
Death sentences are extremely rare in the military justice system, and executions even rarer. Four men, including Hasan, are currently on the military's death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. President George W. Bush approved the execution Army Spc. Ronald Gray in 2008 but it was put on hold by a judge and he remains at Leavenworth.
The last man executed in the military system was Pvt. John Bennett, hanged in 1961 for raping an 11-year-old girl.
