Stephanie Scarbrough/AP

“He’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers. As it should be,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said of Nidal Malik Hasan, convicted of murdering 13 people and wounding 32 at Fort Hood.

“We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it. That it’s public. Because people need to understand that there are serious consequences for these types of things.”

According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon has reportedly confirmed that the execution will be live-streamed.

Hasan committed a horrific crime and deserves to face the gravest consequences under the law. But since when does justice require an audience? Hegseth insists that making the execution a public spectacle will reinforce the message that murder carries the ultimate penalty. But the severity of punishment is not measured by how many people are invited to witness it.

Justice is not entertainment. Punishment is not a performance. And public exhibitions of death are not demonstrations of national strength.

We should be better than this.

A civilized society is measured not only by how it punishes the guilty, but by the moral boundaries it refuses to cross.