By Austin VornhagenIn October 2026, the United States government planned to do something no lawful government is known to have done: livestream an execution.
The prisoner was Nidal Hasan, the former Army major who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009. He is scheduled to die by firing squad on December 3. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wanted the country to be able to watch. Experts who spoke to Reuters said they knew of no previous lawful execution that had been livestreamed or broadcast to the public.
It lasted about a week. Republican senators called it “beyond disgusting” (Thom Tillis) and warned it would make Hasan the martyr he wanted to be (Lisa Murkowski). The top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Jack Reed, called it a “gift to anti-American terrorist recruiters.” A Washington Post, ABC News, and Ipsos poll found 80 percent of Americans opposed streaming it. On October 15, President Trump canceled the livestream, while suggesting it might have been a strong deterrent and allowing that people “would rather not watch him die.”
Here’s the puzzle. If the whole point is to send a message, why does showing the message make powerful people so nervous?
Because a public execution is a message whose sender controls everything except the reading.
Rulers have known this for a very long time. They kept relearning it anyway. Let’s go stand in the crowd.
Three parts: the script, the stage, and the seats
Every public execution was built like a piece of theater, and that is not just a metaphor. There was a script: the sentence, read aloud; the crime, named; ideally a confession; a final warning to the audience. There was a stage: a raised platform, built so that as many people as possible could see. And there were the seats: everyone who came, from the victim’s family to a pickpocket working the edges.
Authorities owned the first two completely. They wrote the script and built the stage. What they never owned was the third part, which happens to be where meaning gets made.
A useful way to predict what someone took away is one question: who did they identify with? If you saw yourself in the victim, you saw justice. If you saw yourself in the state, you saw order. If you saw yourself in the condemned, you saw persecution. If you saw yourself in nobody, you saw a show. Same death. Four different events.
Watch that pattern repeat across 2,700 years. Each step below shows the official message at the top, and what was actually recorded from each part of the crowd. When nothing survives, the ledger says so.
One message in. Four readings out.
The authorities intended
“Resistance costs this much.”
What each part of the crowd took away
- Sides with the stateCarved into palace walls as a royal triumph
- Sides with the condemnedNo surviving record
- Came for the spectacleNo surviving record
- Wasn’t thereThe stone carried the warning to every later viewer, including us
The audience was the point
Assyrian palace reliefs show captured enemies impaled outside besieged towns, in view of the defenders still on the walls. Killing an enemy wasn’t enough. Other people had to see it. Then royal artists carved the scene into palace stone, so the warning outlived the siege. What ordinary people privately thought is simply not recorded, and it would be dishonest to invent it.
- Sides with the state: Carved into palace walls as a royal triumph
- Sides with the condemned: No surviving record
- Came for the spectacle: No surviving record
- Wasn’t there: The stone carried the warning to every later viewer, including us
The first recorded backfire
After the great fire, Nero punished Christians in his own gardens and made it a show. Tacitus, writing decades later and openly hostile to Christians, still reported that the crowd felt pity, because the victims seemed to die “not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty.” The official message was about them. The crowd’s reading was about him.
- Sides with the state: Blame for the fire redirected
- Sides with the condemned: A story of persecution, preserved
- Came for the spectacle: Compassion: “to glut one man’s cruelty”
- Wasn’t there: Tacitus’s readers met a cruel emperor, not a just sentence
Killing a person to kill a claim
Joan of Arc’s condemnation wasn’t only about Joan. Discrediting her claim to divine guidance also threatened the legitimacy of Charles VII, whose coronation she had helped secure. In 1456 a new proceeding annulled her condemnation. The official judgment was reversed by the same kind of institution that issued it.
- Sides with the state: A heretic, properly condemned
- Sides with the condemned: A loyal servant of the king, wronged
- Came for the spectacle: The crowd’s private reactions are thinly documented
- Wasn’t there: Condemnation annulled in 1456
One death, two permanent meanings
Parliament’s court tried Charles I for tyranny and treason and executed him in public. That proved something radical: a king could be held to account. It also gave royalists a martyr. Objects tied to his death became relics, and loyalists wore commemorative jewelry. After the monarchy returned, the Church of England marked the day for “King Charles the Martyr.” Both meanings survived, side by side, for centuries.
- Sides with the state: A tyrant answered for his subjects’ blood
- Sides with the condemned: “They have killed our rightful king”
- Came for the spectacle: Relics and keepsakes
- Wasn’t there: Remembered as a martyr after the Restoration
The lesson came with a souvenir program
The ideal Tyburn hanging had a script: the prisoner confesses, warns the crowd, dies repentant. The prison chaplain even sold the script. From 1676 to 1772 the Ordinary of Newgate published accounts of the condemned and their last dying speeches. But in 1725 Bernard Mandeville complained that the drinking and confusion of the procession made any instruction impossible, and he described crowds fighting surgeons for the bodies.
- Sides with the state: The Ordinary’s printed confession, for a few pence
- Sides with the condemned: Admiration for prisoners who died game
- Came for the spectacle: A holiday: drink, vendors, pickpockets
- Wasn’t there: Readers got the chaplain’s version
The crowd became the scandal
Charles Dickens watched the hanging of Marie and Frederick Manning from a rooftop above a crowd usually put at around 30,000. The next day he wrote to The Times that nothing could be imagined as awful as “the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd.” In his telling, the audience had eclipsed both the crime and the punishment. That is one writer’s reading, not a survey. It is also the reading that traveled.
- Sides with the state: Justice done, before thousands
- Sides with the condemned: Not the story anyone told
- Came for the spectacle: Jokes, fights, and songs, by Dickens’s account
- Wasn’t there: Times readers met the crowd, not the murder
Britain closes the curtain
On May 26, 1868, Michael Barrett, convicted over a deadly bombing at Clerkenwell, became the last person publicly hanged in England. His execution had been postponed twice over questions about his guilt. Days later, Parliament’s new law moved executions inside prison walls. In the debates, supporters of the change argued that public hangings could make criminals look heroic. Capital punishment stayed. The audience left.
- Sides with the state: Order, at last behind walls
- Sides with the condemned: Doubts over his guilt
- Came for the spectacle: The Times called that crowd “unusually orderly”
- Wasn’t there: Parliament decided the audience itself was the risk
The image escaped
Eugen Weidmann was guillotined outside the prison at Versailles on June 17, 1939. Accounts describe an unruly crowd, some of whom reportedly soaked handkerchiefs as souvenirs. Someone filmed it from a nearby apartment, and photographs ran in the press. The government, embarrassed, quickly ended public executions in France. The spectacle that was meant to moralize was now the thing that needed hiding.
- Sides with the state: Embarrassment, then a ban
- Sides with the condemned: Not recorded
- Came for the spectacle: Souvenir hunting at the barricades
- Wasn’t there: Film and photos the state never approved
Look at the last seat, the people who weren’t there. It keeps getting bigger.
In Assyria the absent audience met the event in carved stone, chosen by the king. At Tyburn they met it in the chaplain’s pamphlet. By 1849 they met it in Dickens’s letter, and by 1939 in film the government never approved. Every new medium handed more of the meaning to people who weren’t standing in the square, and less of it to the people who built the stage.
Notice also what finally ended public executions in Britain and France. Not a sudden belief that executions were wrong; both countries kept executing people for decades. What changed was the authorities’ verdict on the audience. The crowd had stopped being the people receiving the lesson. It had become the evidence against it.
Before we go further, try the mechanism yourself.
Same death. Where are you standing?
Here is one moment, invented to show the mechanism. A condemned man climbs the steps. He doesn’t beg. He says a few calm words, forgives the crowd, and the sentence is carried out. Nothing about the event changes below. Only the seat does.
This person sawJustice
“Calm? He doesn’t get to be calm. I don’t care how he walks up those steps. My brother doesn’t get to walk anywhere.”
She identifies with the person who was killed. The condemned man’s composure changes nothing for her. If anything, it insults her.
This person sawOrder
“Solemn, quick, by the book. The sentence was read, the chaplain was there, nobody rushed the rail. The law worked today.”
He identifies with the institution. What he watches is procedure, and procedure went fine. This is the reading the authorities were hoping everyone would have.
This person sawMartyr
“He forgave them. He forgave all of us. Tell me who in that box looked more like a Christian today.”
He identifies with the condemned and already doubted the trial. The calm last words don’t prove innocence, but they become his evidence anyway.
This person sawShow
“You should’ve heard the noise when he got to the top. Best view I’ve ever had. I’m coming back next time.”
He identifies with nobody. He came for the event, and the event delivered. The moral lesson never reached him at all.
This person sawWhatever was printed
“The sheet says he wept and confessed and begged the crowd to learn from him. Well, that settles it.”
She wasn’t there. She identifies with whoever wrote the account. Her reading was chosen for her by a printer. Hold onto her. She’s about to become most of the audience.
A composite scene. These five voices are invented; the pattern they illustrate runs through every case in this essay.
You could put the most eloquent official in the world on that platform and it would not change what the sister or the parishioner heard. The message was never decided on the stage. It was decided by the relationship each watcher already had with the people on it.
Which leads to the comfortable conclusion most people reach at this point: so cruelty always backfires. It doesn’t.
Sometimes the intended message landed exactly
Between the end of Reconstruction and the mid-20th century, the Equal Justice Initiative has documented more than 4,000 racial terror lynchings of Black people in the United States. These were not executions by any court, although officials sometimes tolerated or enabled them. Many were deliberately public. Crowds gathered, sometimes in the thousands. Photographers attended, and their pictures were sold and mailed as postcards.
The message was aimed past the person being killed, at every Black family in the county: this can happen to you, and no one will stop it. It would be false and frankly obscene to tell a reassuring story here in which the crowd saw through it. For the people it was designed to terrify, the terror was real and it worked for generations. For the white spectators who posed for those photographs, the event performed something else: approval, belonging, power.
And still, the meaning did not stay put. Pictures made as trophies were later collected, published, and exhibited as evidence of atrocity. Today they help document the very crimes they once celebrated.
An execution can succeed as a threat while failing as a claim to justice. Those are two different messages, and the crowd grades them separately.
That distinction is the key to everything that follows. Fear can be delivered from the stage. Legitimacy has to be granted from the seats.
The audience grows. The explanation shrinks.
Here is the mechanism behind that growing last seat. Scroll through four ways of meeting the same event, and watch two things move in opposite directions.
Everyone who saw it was standing in the explanation
In the square, the death came wrapped in the official story: the sentence read aloud, the chaplain, the prisoner’s last words, the gallows sermon. You could misread it, and plenty of people did. But you could not see the death without also seeing the reasons the state gave for it.
Paper carried the story farther, and the official framing came along
Printed accounts let people far from Tyburn meet the execution. The audience grew. The words mostly traveled with the event, because the words were the product. But someone had already chosen which words. The chaplain’s account was a version, not the scene.
An image travels without the speech
Photographs of spectacle lynchings were printed as postcards and mailed. Weidmann’s death was filmed from a window. A picture reaches people the sermon never could, and it arrives with whatever caption the sender writes on the back. The lesson is now optional.
Unlimited reach. Nothing guaranteed to travel with it.
A livestream is the square with the walls removed. Anyone can watch, record, clip, slow down, re-caption, set to music, and repost. The trial, the appeals, and the victims’ names do not fit in fifteen seconds. Every viewer becomes the reader 200 miles away, and the printer is now anyone with a phone.
So what would the livestream have done?
We don’t have to guess entirely, because the public answered part of the question before anything aired. Two polls taken in October 2026 asked Americans about the punishment and the broadcast separately, and got very different answers.
A separate Reuters/Ipsos poll, taken October 16 to 19, found the same split from another angle: 71 percent said showing executions on television or the internet was inappropriate, including majorities of both Republicans and Democrats, while 46 percent said executing Hasan by firing squad was appropriate.
That gap is the whole history of this essay in two numbers. Millions of Americans want the punishment and do not want the show. They are drawing the same line Parliament drew in 1868: the sentence is one act, the audience is another, and the second can poison the first.
So run the experiment that got canceled. My forecast, and it is a forecast, built on the history above rather than on evidence about this case: the same four seats fill up, at national scale.
- Sides with the state. Some viewers would see deserved punishment and national strength, focus on the 13 people he killed, and feel sincerely vindicated.
- Sides with the punishment, not the show. A much larger group, on the polls’ evidence, would object to what the government was inviting them to take part in. That turns an argument about one man into an argument about the government.
- Sides with the condemned. A small extremist audience was the senators’ worry: footage of a paralyzed man shot by American soldiers is exactly the raw material a recruiter wants. I would not expect most Americans to see him as a hero. A recruiter only needs a few.
- Wasn’t there. Everyone else, which is to say almost everyone, would meet a clip. Cut, captioned, and passed along by strangers, it could show the death and none of the reasons.
The comparison nobody in Washington wanted
Several of the plan’s critics said a broadcast would put the United States on the level of terrorist groups that publish executions. ISIS is the obvious reference. A factual note: ISIS mostly distributed recorded, carefully edited videos, not live streams, and used them for propaganda and recruitment.
Is the comparison fair? On one axis, no. A court sentence that followed evidence, a defense lawyer, and years of appeals is not the same act as a murder of a hostage. That difference is enormous, and it is the difference the government is relying on.
On the other axis, the one this essay is about, the resemblance is real: an organization arranging a captive person’s death and transmitting it to an audience in order to say something about its own power. And here is the cruel part.
Due process doesn’t fit in a fifteen-second clip. The resemblance does.
The legal distinction lives in transcripts. The visual similarity lives in the footage. Only one of those gets reposted. A government that livestreams an execution is betting that its explanation will travel as far as its images. History, from the Ordinary’s pamphlet to the apartment window at Versailles, says it won’t.
Where the death penalty is actually heading
Zoom out from one prisoner, and the global picture is two trends running in opposite directions at once.
Amnesty International, Death Sentences and Executions 2025; Death Penalty Information Center, 2025 year-end report and innocence data. Amnesty’s figures are minimums.
Fewer places use the punishment, but the places that use it are using it more. Globally, a single country produced most of 2025’s surge. In the United States, executions nearly doubled while juries kept handing down very few new death sentences, and much of the increase came from one state. Using a punishment less widely does not mean fewer people experience it.
The likeliest path, judging from those numbers, is an uneven retreat: some jurisdictions abandoning executions, others reserving them for rare cases, a few using them aggressively, with any major attack or political shift able to interrupt the long decline. I would not bet on a date for American abolition.
History can’t tell you whether a state should ever execute anyone. The strongest argument for it is moral, not practical: some crimes seem to deserve it, and no statistic settles what a person deserves. The strongest practical arguments against it are that a prison can hold someone securely, and that 203 exonerations since 1973 show the system makes mistakes that only a living prisoner can survive. Deterrence won’t break the tie: a 2012 National Research Council review concluded that existing studies could not tell whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates. That is uncertainty, not proof of no effect.
What history can settle is narrower. Accountability needs witnesses. Spectacle needs an audience. They are not the same thing, and every society that confused them eventually found out.
Independent witnesses, public records, and real investigation of botched executions let citizens check what their government did in their name. That is the honest version of the old argument for visibility, the one about verifying that a sentence was carried out fairly and not in secret. A broadcast adds nothing to that check. It adds only an audience, and an audience, as we’ve seen, writes its own ending.
The crowd was never the target. It was the author.
Go back to the empty platform in the fog. For 2,700 years, people with power built that stage on the theory that watching a death would teach the watchers what to think. Nero thought it would redirect blame. The English thought it would teach repentance. The French thought it would moralize. Each time, the crowd took the raw material and wrote something else: pity, martyrdom, a holiday, a scandal, a letter to The Times.
The one time the intended message landed cleanly was when it was pure threat, aimed at people who had no power to answer. Even that meaning eventually changed hands, when the photographs became evidence.
A livestream doesn’t change the mechanism. It scales it. It turns millions of strangers into the reader 200 miles away, and it fires the printer. That is why a plan to show strength produced, within a week, an argument about cruelty, and why the people who proposed it backed down before anyone pressed play.
You can schedule a death. You can’t schedule what it means.
This essay began as a conversation with an AI about the history of public executions and the message they sent, then was checked against sources: Tacitus, Annals 15.44 (Church and Brodribb translation); British Museum material on Assyrian palace reliefs; France’s Ministry of Justice on Joan of Arc’s trial; London Museum collections on Charles I; the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts via Old Bailey Online; Mandeville’s 1725 Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn; Dickens’s November 1849 letter to The Times; accounts of the 1868 Capital Punishment Amendment Act and of Eugen Weidmann’s 1939 execution; the Equal Justice Initiative’s Lynching in America; Amnesty International’s Death Sentences and Executions 2025; the Death Penalty Information Center’s 2025 year-end report; the National Research Council’s Deterrence and the Death Penalty (2012); and October 2026 reporting by Reuters, CNBC, CBS News, The Hill, and ABC News on the Hasan livestream and the Reuters/Ipsos and Washington Post, ABC News, and Ipsos polls. The forecasts are the author’s. The hero film, the pick-a-seat voices, and the medium chart are illustrations.
If “the audience writes the meaning” stuck with you
Your Voice Is Not a Password Anymore
When any clip can be faked, footage stops proving anything on its own. The trust stack that still works.
Read the essay →Essay · Minds that won’t moveNobody Will Ever Admit They Were Wrong
Why the parishioner and the victim’s sister both walk away more certain, and the system that fixes mistakes anyway.
Read the essay →Essay · State powerYour Data Is Perfectly Safe. That’s the Problem.
Another kind of power exercised in your name, and the fixes that make a government’s mistake survivable.
Read the essay →Every message gets rewritten by its audience. Including yours.
Your business has a script too: what you think your website says. Your visitors read it from their own seats, in a few seconds, often on a phone, often without the context you assumed they had. At Content Pilots I build fast websites that make the right reading the easy one, with booking, payments, and follow-up wired in so the next step is obvious. And if you’re a historian who thinks I got something wrong, email me. I would genuinely like the correction.