Today’s story isn’t something that you hear about everyday, which, frankly, is a good thing. After all, we’re talking about people who have done something so terrible, so absolutely horrible that the military gave them the death penalty.
The military hasn’t “carried out the death penalty since 1961,” says Jonathan J. Cooper with the Associated Press.
That means that they haven’t had this situation come up in the last 65 years at the time of this writing.
But today’s story gets even more extreme. We’re actually talking about the first military execution since World War II (January 1945, to be exact).
It almost seems unreal to realize that. Cooper gives us the details:
President Donald Trump has approved the execution by firing squad of Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan for the 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas.
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 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.”
Hasan did horrible things, and, now, it sounds like he’ll meet a horrible end, but that’s not to say that it’s going to happen quickly. Cooper notes that a number of procedural options to delay the execution are available to Hasan should he decide to use them.
We’ll have to see whether he will or not.
What is clear is that an unusual day has come in which our military is taking doing the right thing to an extraordinary level. Is that a change from how it has been? I actually can’t answer that question. I’m only saying that it is a high level of expectation, and that we have an unexpected end result to this horrible situation.