PETER HITCHENS: I back capital punishment and have seen two executions. But I urge you NOT to watch the live stream of a US soldier’s death by firing squad

DAILYMAIL.COM • 4h ago

By PETER HITCHENS, COLUMNIST AND COMMENTATOR 22:00 10 Oct 2026, updated 23:38 10 Oct 2026

Having seen two executions at close quarters, I can advise you quite strongly not to watch the planned shooting in Texas of the mass killer Nidal Hasan by a live-streamed firing squad.

The former US Army major killed 13 people and wounded 32 others, and has admitted it, so I am not really worried about whether it is right to execute him. It’s the public element of it that I dislike.

I am pretty leathery and hard-boiled after half a century in the cruel trade of journalism, so you should listen to me. Watching an execution will change you.

You will be older, and you will be guilty. Of what? Of all your own sins, only more so, is the easiest way of explaining.

I know of people more sensitive than I am who have been haunted by what they had witnessed many years afterwards, as they approached their own deaths. I worry about this.

The first execution I saw, of a squalid killer called Larry Anderson, was by lethal injection in Texas. This was in April 1994. He had abducted, robbed and many times stabbed a woman called Zelda Webster and then dumped her body on waste ground. There was no doubt of his guilt.

To my surprise I ended up wishing the execution had been more violent. There was something loathsome about the hospital atmosphere and furniture of the death chamber, and the use of intravenous tubes. We associate these things with healing. It was wrong to disguise death as a medical procedure.

The second time, in Georgia in April 1995, was the death in the electric chair of a British-born man called Nicholas Lee Ingram. Again, there was no doubt of his guilt. Ingram had broken into the remote home of J. C. and Mary Sawyer, terrified them with his gun, forced them into the woods, tied them to a tree and shot them both in the head.

Mrs Sawyer survived and was able to give decisive evidence against him.

I have seen pictures of Mr Sawyer’s body after the murder.

I don’t think we should ever write about executions without remembering the victims of the executed person.

Death by electrocution is very violent. Ingram, by this time a shaven-headed, shackled and helpless prisoner, literally spat his defiance before being strapped into the polished dark wood chair by enormous guards.

I do not know if US Secretary for War Pete Hegseth will offer Nidal Hasan the choice of facing his firing squad or being blindfolded, but Ingram’s face was covered with a shiny leather mask whether he liked it or not. I am quite glad of that, actually. And then there was a tremendous thwack as a man-made bolt of lightning went through him, stiffening and jolting his body against the chair. Nothing went wrong. He didn’t catch fire, as some electric chair occupants have. There was no smell of burning. There was no visible sign that he suffered prolonged torture, only that single devastating blow.

He was just brutally, ferociously dead, when he had been alive a few minutes before, thanks to the will of the State of Georgia.

I still don’t actually think either of these executions was wrong in principle. I think heinous murder needs to be punished and deterred, and I think the arguments against capital punishment are either sentimental or evasive. Only total pacifists (which I am not) can accept them.

I am even glad that I saw them, because it was my job as a reporter. First, I had in a way willed them, by supporting capital punishment in general – though I should say here that I don’t support it in today’s Britain, where juries are far too weak and the chance of wrongful conviction is terrifyingly high.

Second, I agree with the American principle of keeping things open. There should be media witnesses at such events (as there once were in England) to see that they are properly handled. Nobody made me go.

I am not complaining about the price I paid, just urging you not to pay it.

Public executions ended in Britain in 1868, in France in 1939 and in the US in 1936. America’s last such event took place in Owensboro, Kentucky, after a dubious rape trial in an era of grave racial bigotry. The executed man, Rainey Bethea (who was black), was hanged in front of a festive crowd of 20,000. Photographs exist. Spectators ate hot dogs and drank fizzy drinks as Bethea died.

There were all-night ‘hanging parties’ and nearby hotels were full of spectators. The State of Kentucky, embarrassed, ended such spectacles thereafter.

They had learned what Britain already knew, that public execution is a disturbing and depraved event, a nasty form of pagan human sacrifice, releasing emotions that ought not to be released.

Charles Dickens attended a double hanging in Southwark, south London in November 1849. Afterwards he wrote to The Times – not to criticise the death penalty but the effect it had on the crowd.

He wrote that ‘a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning could be imagined by no man, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun’.

He described how ‘when the day dawned, thieves, low prostitutes, ruffians and vagabonds of every kind, flocked on to the ground, with every variety of offensive and foul behaviour. Fightings, faintings, whistlings… brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police, with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment’.

He lamented: ‘When the sun rose brightly – as it did – it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the Devil.

‘When the two miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them were turned quivering into the air, there was no more emotion, no more pity, no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgment, no more restraint in any of the previous obscenities than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world, and there were no belief among men but that they perished like the beasts.’

It still took almost 20 years for public hangings to be abolished here. No doubt there were plenty of Trump-like politicians to defend them. But I am with Dickens.

Millions watching on wide screens in their homes are no better than crowds milling around that Southwark scaffold. Such appetites, once stirred, will grow. And it will be a downward step.

President Trump and his Secretary for War probably have little idea of the forces they will be stirring if they go ahead with this event on December 3.

I hope they change their minds. If they do not, I urge you not to watch, and certainly not to bring this sight into the peace of your home.

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