Pope Leo renewed his condemnation of the death penalty yesterday, saying it violates the sanctity of human life and deprives people of the chance of redemption, days after the Pentagon said it planned to livestream an execution.
The US military will livestream the upcoming firing squad execution of a gunman who killed 13 people at the Fort Hood military base in 2009, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Thursday, in what would be an unprecedented broadcast of a US execution.
“The common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment,” Leo, the first pope from the United States, said in a social media post, without mentioning the Pentagon plan.
“The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” he added in the message posted on World Day Against the Death Penalty.
Nidal Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, is set to become the first person to be executed by firing squad by the US military since 1945.
The livestream plan, championed by Hegseth, has drawn opposition from legislators, including from President Donald Trump’s Republicans, religious leaders and international observers.
Trump himself has said he has not yet decided whether to allow the live feed.
Vice President JD Vance expressed scepticism over whether the Pentagon will proceed with livestreaming the scheduled December 3 execution of former US Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan, who was found guilty in a US military trial of fatally shooting 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009.
“I don’t know that that’s actually going to happen,” Vance told reporters in Cincinnati, referring to the livestream plan.
If it is shown publicly, Vance said, “I’m not going to be watching it.”
Trump told reporters that Hasan deserves the death penalty by firing squad, calling him ‘totally nuts’. But when asked if he wants the execution livestreamed, the Republican president said he has yet to ‘make a determination about that’.
A senior US Catholic bishop and a US evangelical Christian leader voiced opposition to the plan, as did the UN human rights office.
Several Republican US legislators argued against livestreaming.
Senator John Curtis wrote on social media that ‘a civilisation erodes when it cultivates an appetite for executions as a form of entertainment’.
Senator Thom Tillis and Representative Austin Scott said livestreaming executions is what extremists would do. Representative Rob Bresnahan said the pain felt by victims and family members ‘deserves respect, not a public show’.
“This should be reconsidered,” Representative Michael Baumgartner wrote on social media.
Democrats were overwhelmingly opposed.
The event would be extraordinary, even for a country that has long employed capital punishment. A government execution has never been broadcast or livestreamed, according to death penalty experts, and the US military has not executed anyone by firing squad since 1945. Hasan, now 56, is believed to be confined to a wheelchair, having been shot by police during his arrest.
Archbishop Paul Coakley, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, condemned the planned livestream as a ‘barbaric promotion of a culture of death’.
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