What death by firing squad actually looks like as Trump orders first military execution in 60 years
President Donald Trump has approved the execution of a former US Army major by firing squad, the Pentagon has announced.
Spokesperson Sean Parnell said that the commander-in-chief has given the green light for Nidal Malik Hasan to meet his grisly fate, nearly two decades after the devastating Fort Hood shooting.
It’s a controversial and uncommon method of execution in the US – and those who have watched one unfold have conflicting opinions on the humaneness of the process.
Hasan, 56, is one of four men on the military’s death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas – and Parnell said ‘judgement day has finally come’ for him.
On Tuesday (6 October), the Pentagon spokesperson shared a social media post explaining that both Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Trump have rubber stamped his pending execution.
Hasan will meet his fate in December (Bell County Sheriff’s Office via Getty Images)
Hasan’s scheduled death on 3 December will mark the first military execution since April 1961.
He was given the ultimate punishment in August 2013 by a military jury after he was found guilty of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder.
The former US Army psychiatrist, from Virginia, opened fire with a laser-sighted handgun at the Texas military base, Fort Hood, in November 2009. It left 13 soldiers ᴅᴇᴀᴅ and another 30 injured.
Hasan was left using a wheelchair as he was partially paralysed due to a shootout with police who battled to subdue him during the mᴀss shooting – and he is now set to soon meet a similar fate to his victims.
If the military execution goes ahead, his last moments will likely be extremely unpleasant.
The metal chair at the rear of the room is what death row inmates are strapped to before the firing squad begin (South Carolina Department of Corrections)
The procedure is expected to be similar to those used by US states who put prisoners to death with a firing squad, such as Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah.
It may be comparable to the execution of Brad Sigmon in South Carolina in March last year, which saw three officials open fire at him while aiming for a red bullseye target on his chest.
Witnesses described how they saw the double murderer strapped to a chair, which had a basin underneath it to catch blood, before a hood was then placed over his head.
A curtain that had concealed the firing squad was then opened, before sH๏τs were fired simultaneously at Sigmon.
A reporter for the ᴀssociated Press described observing his chest rise and fall several times after the bullets penetrated his body. It took three minutes for him to die after the first sH๏τ was fired.
How death by firing squad unfolded for Sigmon
Brad Sigmon was pronounced ᴅᴇᴀᴅ three minutes after his execution began (South Carolina Department of Corrections)
Brutally, the bullets that were used are designed to break apart on impact and inflict maximum damage on the condemned inmate. Those who observe such executions are often given ear plugs to protect their ears.
As detailed by FOX Carolina News in wake of Sigmon’s death, he was strapped down to a metal chair that is bolted to the floor in the execution chamber at the Broad River Correctional Insтιтution in South Carolina.
Those responsible for putting him to death were Department of Corrections employees who, interestingly, had volunteered for the macabre job.
The publication reported that there was a ‘portal’ in the wall of the execution chamber, which is where rifles that were each loaded with live ammunition were positioned, before the triggers were pulled from around 15ft (4.6m) away.
After the warden recited the execution order, bullets rained down on Sigmon, before a doctor pronounced him ᴅᴇᴀᴅ minutes later.
Although his method is perhaps more definitive that other methods such as the lethal injection, as demonstrated during Christa Pike’s botched execution last week, it apparently isn’t any easier to watch.
What witnesses have described
Reporters who saw Ronnie Lee Gardner be put to death by a firing squad in Utah in June 2010 gave chilling accounts of what happened in the moments after the trigger was pulled.
The killer explicitly wished to meet his fate this way and famously told the Deseret News in 1996: “I like the firing squad. It’s so much easier… and there’s no mistakes.”
Ronnie Lee Gardner requested a firing squad (Utah Department of Corrections)
He was pronounced ᴅᴇᴀᴅ approximately two minutes after a five-man firing squad unloaded at him from 25 feet (8m) away.
KSL5TV former reporter Sandra Yi explained that Gardner’s head was ‘restrained’ by officials during his execution, ensuring he could not budge.
“There was a strap across his forehead, so he couldn’t move his head,” she told ᴀssociated Press at the time. “But I could see him moving his eyes…and it looked almost like he could see us through the window, even though he couldn’t. When he was sH๏τ, some of us I think weren’t sure if he had pᴀssed away because we could see movement.
“He had his fist clenched and we can see his elbow move up and down and his thumb and forefingers moving, rubbing against each other.”
A chair used for firing squad executions in Utah (Utah State Department of Corrections)
Others shared similar accounts, such as Pat Reavy from Deseret News, who recalled how Gardner ‘kept moving’ after the round of sH๏τs were fired at him.
The general consensus was that the firing squad got the job done efficiently, as KTVX-TV reporter Marcos Ortiz said: “What caught my attention was that it was so sudden, so quick. Boom, boom! Just like that.”
Sheryl Worsley, reporting for KSL NewsRadio, concurred and described it as being ‘over pretty quickly’.
“It was cleaner than I expected and it was fast,” she said. “But he moved, he moved a little bit. And to some degree that bothers me and to some degree that mirrors the last few weeks of his life…because he was fighting to stay alive the last few weeks of his life, legally, and that seemed to carry on the last 60 to 120 seconds.”
In response to the news of Hasan’s execution date being set, Death Penalty Action – an organisation which opposes capital punishment – said: “There is nothing Donald Trump loves more than the power to kill.”
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
