The impending firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan — the Army psychiatrist convicted of killing thirteen people and wounding 32 others at Fort Hood in 2009 — has revived an old, uncomfortable argument: should the public get to watch? That’s the question Ted Noel takes up in a new American Thinker commentary, and his answer is an unhesitating yes.
Noel, a retired physician who writes on social media as Doctor Ted, frames the debate around lex talionis, the biblical “eye for an eye” principle. Far from being a bloodthirsty rule, he argues, it functions as a restraint on the state — a guarantee that no offender receives a punishment harsher than the harm he caused. “It is actually a restriction on punishment,” he writes, one that historically spared the lives of minor offenders and kept authorities from imposing penalties beyond the crime.
From Fort Hood to the firing squad
The commentary notes that Hasan was convicted by military court-martial and sentenced to death, but that the sentence went unexecuted for years — a delay Noel attributes to the Obama and Hagel-era Pentagon, though he offers only speculation about the reasons. The sentence has re-emerged, he writes, under President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
What turned the case into a flashpoint was Hegseth’s announcement that the execution would be livestreamed. The reaction, per Noel, was immediate and predictable: critics called the idea a violation of civilized norms, while some conservatives joined the objections. Trump subsequently canceled the livestream. Noel’s piece is unimpressed by the outcry, suggesting critics ignore their own past calls for Republicans to be executed and describing their reasoning as limbic rather than forebrain.
A constitutional objection, dismissed
The more serious argument against broadcasting an execution is the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Noel doesn’t concede the point. Public executions were the historical norm, he writes, and the methods used through the centuries — the axe, the guillotine, the noose, the firing squad — were understood in their own eras as quick and reliable rather than gratuitously cruel. The Framers knew these methods and accepted them. Hanging could drag on if the neck didn’t break, but even that, in Noel’s view, was tolerable given the gravity of the underlying crime.
He extends the reasoning to botched lethal injections, arguing that even a failed procedure is less cruel than the death the offender inflicted on his victim — and floats the grim idea that a botched execution might amount to an unintentional form of just punishment. Applied literally to Hasan, lex talionis would permit shooting him 32 times and then dealing the coup de grâce thirteen more, Noel notes. That won’t happen, he concedes. Hasan will receive an end far more merciful than his victims’.
The legal footing, as Noel describes it, is not in dispute: Hasan enlisted voluntarily and placed himself under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which authorizes the death penalty for his offenses, and the firing squad has a long lineage in American military justice stretching back to George Washington’s army.
The case for cameras
With the livestream already canceled, Noel’s remaining argument is about what the public loses when executions happen out of sight. Reading that someone was executed in Texas or Tennessee is “words on a page,” he writes, and the impact is something less than real. Watching it live would leave “an indelible impression.” He reaches for a traffic-collision analogy: a crash on the evening news is pictures and a voice-over, but a crash in front of you is another matter entirely.
The real stake, though, isn’t the spectacle itself but its effect on would-be offenders. A public death penalty, Noel argues, is a tangible threat — one that might make some would-be killers reconsider. Others, he allows, are too committed to evil to care, and some will forge ahead hoping for suicide by police. For everyone else, the visibility of justice done offers a measure of reassurance.
He also makes a narrower point about consent: anyone offended by a livestream need not watch it. And he observes that Hasan himself has raised no objection — perhaps, Noel speculates, because greater publicity would make his “martyrdom” more valuable to jihadist recruiters.
The piece lands where its title promises, on the oldest of retaliatory principles, updated for the age of streaming. Whether or not one accepts Noel’s reading of the Eighth Amendment or his confidence in deterrence, the essay is a reminder that the debate over capital punishment is not only about the condemned — it’s about what the rest of us are permitted, or required, to see.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/hasan-piker-an-eye-for-an-eye/