Before we get into it, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber to my Substack for $12 a month or $100 a year, or by donating to my Ko-fi. Your support helps me keep researching, writing, and producing independent feminist work without having to make everything palatable to people I'd rather argue with.
I've also released the first episode of my documentary series, The History of the Black Panther Party, which you can watch on my YouTube channel.
You can keep up with my increasingly ridiculous projects on Instagram (@bundleof.styx), Twitter (@bundleofstyx_), and Tumblr (@Bundleofstx).
If you enjoy my work, please consider sharing it. Every subscription, donation, and share helps me keep Bundle of Styx going, and I appreciate everyone who's made that possible.
I. YOU'D BE IN THE FRONT ROW.
I started writing this piece about something else entirely, then the government announced plans to livestream a firing squad execution and I had to stop, because people in my feed immediately declared they wouldn't be watching. What caught my attention about it was the specific, reflexive confidence of people who consume public punishment every day insisting they'd never consume it in this form, as though the medium were the problem.
The Army has scheduled Nidal Hasan's execution for December 3, 2026, at Fort Hood, where he killed thirteen people in 2009. On October 8, Pete Hegseth said the firing squad execution would be public, and Pentagon officials said it would be livestreamed. Hegseth gave his reasoning without any embarrassment, explaining that people needed to understand the serious consequences of such acts. By October 10, Trump said he would decide whether the broadcast would happen, so the livestream remains a proposal, and further appeals could delay the execution itself. If carried out, it would be the first U.S. military execution since 1961 and its first by firing squad since 1945. Nobody would have to stand in a field this time. The potential audience would be anyone with an internet connection, and the man at the center of it has committed a crime that makes selling the spectacle easier. \[1\]
The reaction I watched go by online was almost entirely about the people posting it. People announced their refusal in the tone of someone mentioning a gluten allergy, as though it were a fact about how delicate they are. Some mean it, while others may see the footage autoplay inside somebody's furious quote tweet and look, because looking costs nothing and nobody polices your eyes. I'm more interested in the sincere ones. Someone who truly won't watch a man get shot on a government feed can still read a hundred slides about a stranger's worst year, then watch a woman get shut out of every space that used to welcome her and call it a good week for the community. Refusing the footage tells me very little about what consequences that person will help organize elsewhere.
Across much of early modern Europe, states killed people in the open because the display was part of the point. A crime could be treated as an injury to the sovereign, and the answer was delivered on the criminal's body where the community could see the power doing the responding. Speed would have wasted that. In London, the main gallows stood at Tyburn until 1783, and hanging days took on the atmosphere of public holidays. The condemned were carted from Newgate through streets packed with people who had come to drink and to look. Spectators paid for places above the crowd, while printers sold accounts of the prisoner's life and supposed final words. Pickpockets worked the gathering, a detail reformers loved because theft continued underneath the institution supposed to frighten people out of it. \[2\]
The authorities wanted the spectators to serve as witnesses to justice, and their presence gave the state an audience before which to demonstrate its power. Of course, showing up didn't mean you agreed with the verdict. The ceremony relied on the possibility of interpreting attendance as consent, even when the people standing there understood the day differently.
The condemned was expected to acknowledge the justice of the sentence and offer a penitent death as a warning to the people watching. Newgate's chaplain, the Ordinary, had the right to publish the prisoners' confessions and made real money from it, which gave him a financial interest in contrition being performed on cue. A man who gave the expected death handed the state the best possible outcome: a criminal who agreed in public that the law was right about him. One who went up cursing or insisting he'd been framed could turn the sermon inside out and give the crowd a grievance where they were supposed to get a lesson. \[3\]
Even the corpse became contested. Under the Murder Act of 1752, people executed for murder faced dissection or hanging in chains as an additional punishment. Crowds sometimes fought over the bodies claimed by surgeons, defending a burial the sentence had denied. Spectators who had come to enjoy a hanging could turn around and defend the dead man from a further indignity. Anyone who tells you the old crowds were simply brutes hasn't read what they actually did. The authorities needed the crowd, but they couldn't fully control what it made of the day. \[4\]
Colonial Amerika built related ceremonies from its own materials, which in Puritan New England meant God. Ministers preached execution sermons and worked to secure the condemned person's repentance before death. A sinner who handled it well gave a minister an illustration of salvation that an ordinary sermon couldn't supply. The condemned could also refuse the role, using their final words to accuse the people who had judged them. Printed sermons carried those competing interpretations beyond the gathering itself, and the people publishing them had their own financial interest in a story worth buying. \[5\]
Robert-François Damiens was executed in Paris in 1757 for stabbing Louis XV, who survived. The state tortured and dismembered him in public. Michel Foucault opened Discipline and Punish in 1975 with that scene, then set it against the regulated day of a nineteenth-century institution. His argument follows a change in how power works on people: public bodily torment gradually lost its central place as prisons and other institutions increasingly organized conduct through surveillance and routine. Physical coercion continued inside them, even as the public display of sovereign violence became less central to punishment. Foucault also examined crowds that defended the condemned or attacked the executioner, turning a demonstration of authority against the people staging it. A government inviting thousands to witness its power had to contend with what those thousands might decide to do. His account helps explain the movement toward punishment behind institutional walls, although the American history of racial terror shows how public violence could persist alongside modern prisons. \[6\]
Charles Dickens watched the hanging of François Benjamin Courvoisier in 1840, and what disgusted him afterward was the behavior of a gathering that had turned a killing into a fair. He described the scene in an 1846 letter written during his campaign against capital punishment. After witnessing the execution of the Mannings in 1849, his immediate demand was that executions take place inside prison walls. That narrower demand would have preserved the state's ability to kill while removing its public audience. Dickens's position changed over time, and his letters show how easily disgust at spectators could become an argument about where the state should kill. \[7\]
The last public hanging in England was Michael Barrett's, outside Newgate on May 26, 1868, following his conviction over the Clerkenwell bombing. Three days later, the Capital Punishment Amendment Act received royal assent, requiring executions for murder to take place inside prison walls. That sequence concluded a longer reform campaign; Parliament hadn't improvised a response to one rowdy morning. The hangings moved inside, and the institution carried on without the general public gathered around it. \[8\]
In Owensboro, Kentucky, Rainey Bethea was publicly hanged on August 14, 1936, for the rape of seventy-year-old Lischia Edwards. Bethea was Black, and Edwards was white. He had also confessed to killing her, but prosecutors charged only rape. Under Kentucky law, a murder conviction would have led to electrocution at the state penitentiary, while a rape conviction allowed a hanging in the county where the crime occurred. The choice of charge helped determine the form of his death. Newspaper estimates put the audience as high as twenty thousand. National coverage described a carnival, although accounts of the crowd's behavior were disputed. Kentucky abolished hanging in 1938, following the controversy. Those disputes don't erase the official decisions that made thousands of spectators part of the execution in the first place. \[9\]
The government proposing a livestream is making its own decision to assemble an audience. Its deterrence argument needs evidence that broadcasting the death adds protection. The National Institute of Justice's review emphasizes the greater deterrent importance of the certainty of being caught over increased severity, and it reports that existing research cannot establish whether capital punishment changes homicide rates. That leaves the broadcast's promised benefit unestablished, although it doesn't prove that watching an execution could never affect anyone's behavior. The proposal gives the government an opportunity to display its power over a man it has already confined, and I'd like somebody to explain what the public is supposed to gain from watching him die. \[10\]
When you tell me you'd never have gone to an execution, I believe you believe it. Plenty of people who attended historical executions understood themselves as witnesses to justice, and being convinced that you're on the right side has never prevented someone from enjoying a punishment.
### II. EVERYBODY LOVES WATCHING SOMEONE GET WHAT THEY DESERVE.
A crowd can organize around a wrong so thoroughly condemned that responding to it stops counting as hurting someone and starts counting as fixing something. Once people accept that judgment, ordinary citizens can watch a human being die and go home and sleep, because what they watched felt like an account being settled. The word "deserve" does a lot of work here. It presents a judgment as settled while concealing who reached it and whose account of the wrong got believed. Those questions become particularly interesting when the people administering punishment are also the ones who benefit from it.
Émile Durkheim examined punishment's contribution to solidarity in The Division of Labour in Society in 1893. Punishing a violation, he argued, reaffirms the shared beliefs that the offense has challenged. When somebody breaks a rule, the rule wobbles, and condemning the violation together helps everyone feel it set firm again. That helps explain why condemnation can be such a cheap way to belong. You point at the same person everyone else is pointing at, with the same heat, and you've supplied evidence that you share the group's commitments. Someone unsure of their standing has an incentive to make that agreement particularly visible. \[11\]
His later argument that crime is normal went further: even a society of saints would find minor faults intolerable by its own standards. The boundary of acceptable behavior depends on the group drawing it. A community that relies on expulsion to demonstrate its integrity can therefore develop an appetite for finding people worth expelling, regardless of whether the group has correctly identified a threat. Durkheim helps explain the satisfaction of condemnation, but his account leaves us with the political question of whose values are being defended.
On Amerikan ground, the interests being defended are impossible to ignore. In Memphis in March 1892, a mob took Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart from jail and shot them. They were associated with the People's Grocery, a successful Black business competing with a white grocer named Barrett. Ida B. Wells, who knew the murdered men, described how Barrett's threats developed into a confrontation involving armed deputies in civilian clothes. Men defending the store fired on them, saying afterward that they hadn't known they were officers. Their arrests put them in a jail from which the mob could take them. Wells traced the killing back through that conflict and the white resentment of Black independence. \[12\]
White newspapers described the men as dangerous criminals. Across the wider defense of lynching, the alleged danger to white women supplied a recurrent justification. Wells took that pretext apart in Southern Horrors in 1892 and A Red Record in 1895, showing that rape accusations appeared in only a minority of the cases she examined and challenging the truth of particular accusations. She also documented killings connected to economic rivalry or resistance to white authority. In Memphis, defending white control over local trade gave the violence a purpose that the language of restoring order concealed. \[12\]
The newspapers supplied an explanation of the killings that white readers could comfortably accept. Wells followed the interests behind that explanation, exposing how the language of criminality could make Black economic independence appear threatening enough to justify murder. Durkheim's solidarity becomes considerably less innocent when the people reaffirming their shared values are white merchants benefiting from the destruction of a Black competitor.
Spectacle lynching gave that project an audience with a role beyond receiving the warning afterward. On May 15, 1916, in Waco, Texas, Jesse Washington, a seventeen-year-old Black farmhand, was convicted of murder by a jury that deliberated four minutes. A mob then dragged him out of the courthouse and tortured and burned him to death near city hall. The mayor and police chief were present, and estimates put the gathering at ten to fifteen thousand. Photographs of the killing circulated as souvenirs. White spectators could participate in the assertion of racial power, while Black residents were shown how little protection the courthouse offered. \[13\]
At Tyburn, officials carried out a legal sentence before a gathering whose responses they couldn't fully determine. At Waco, a mob seized a prisoner who had already been sentenced to death and imposed its own public killing with official acquiescence. The difference matters because racial terror depended on a distribution of power in which the perpetrators could expect protection from the very authorities supposedly responsible for preventing murder. The Equal Justice Initiative's third edition of Lynching in America documented 4,084 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states between 1877 and 1950, with more than three hundred elsewhere. Its report states that only one percent of lynchings after 1900 resulted in a lyncher being convicted of a criminal offense. The people organizing these killings had good reason to believe they could get away with them. \[14\]
Their pleasure also survived the event itself. People kept photographs of the murders, and one surviving postcard describes a killing as a barbecue while identifying the sender in the image, signing off as "your son Joe." James Allen and John Littlefield's collection, published in Without Sanctuary in 2000, preserves evidence of people treating racist murder as something worth remembering. These postcards made lynching into a commodity, allowing spectators to share their participation with people who hadn't attended. Calling it a moment of madness can't account for the work of printing and circulating the keepsakes afterward. \[15\]
After Waco, the NAACP commissioned Elisabeth Freeman to investigate, and W.E.B. Du Bois used her findings and photographs in The Crisis supplement "The Waco Horror." Images sold as souvenirs could become evidence against the people celebrating. Their circulation could expose the institutions that allowed the killing, depending on who controlled the record and what they did with it. \[16\]
The American history of racial terror also exposes the limits of treating public punishment as a matter of individual cruelty. White supremacy supplied the perpetrators with an explanation for their actions, while the police and courts helped determine who would suffer and who could participate without consequences. The people attending these killings occupied different positions within a racial order, and that order gave the violence its political purpose. A legal execution and a lynching aren't interchangeable events, even when both involve an audience being invited to accept suffering as deserved.
Wells's investigation leaves us with a question worth asking of contemporary accountability processes: who benefits from the punishment, and what does it allow them to keep? The person condemned may genuinely have done something wrong, and a necessary restriction can produce understandable satisfaction. Neither circumstance establishes that every consequence organized afterward serves the people who were harmed.
### III. WE GOT RID OF THE SCAFFOLD AND KEPT THE FUCKING CROWD.
Public condemnation can do its damage through third parties who control something the target needs. The people who gather around a callout don't have to control anyone's employment or housing directly. They can reach the employer, or the friend whose name is on the lease, and make keeping the person more expensive than letting them go. Neither has to believe the accusation. An employer weighing one worker against a full inbox may ask what holding on will cost and decide the cheapest answer is to drop whoever the crowd is looking at. The institution then gets to describe that as a values decision, concealing a calculation about exposure.
A participant can say they never fired or evicted anyone while having deliberately pressured the person who did. Each person who forwards a callout can contribute to consequences whose total nobody has to decide or answer for. The injury gets distributed across a chain of individual decisions, allowing everyone involved to claim their own contribution was too small to matter. You can help ruin somebody's life and still have a perfectly sincere explanation for why you personally didn't do anything.
People can lose jobs and the housing that depended on them. They can also lose the informal networks through which broke people sustain themselves, including the group house or the commission passed hand to hand through the same circle that just closed. Those losses don't photograph well, so they're easy to leave out of an account of the punishment. For trans people whose safety net is a community, those networks may be most of what they have. A callout document can arrive as a screenshot in a group chat and receive a verdict in the time it takes to type "that's so fucked up, I had no idea." Sharing it becomes a way to demonstrate that you knew to keep your distance, regardless of how much you actually know.
When the target of a pile-on apologizes, the response can become another occasion to explain why they're irredeemable. A bad apology deserves criticism, and a good one doesn't repair the harm by itself. The problem arises when every possible response supplies new grounds for extending the punishment. The person can't know what change would count, because the crowd keeps moving the conditions for ending its attention. Contrition becomes another performance to evaluate while the actual work of repair remains unspecified.
An online document may also outlive the group that wrote it, reaching people who have no way to know whether its claims were corrected or its subject changed. Formal punishment has its own enduring consequences, and a prison sentence with an end date gives us no reason to romanticize the courts. A community claiming to support change still has to decide how a judgment can be challenged and who is responsible for reviewing continued exclusion. Otherwise, the original accusation can keep authorizing losses long after anyone has asked what they're accomplishing.
Attention keeps the process going, and attention pays in standing and sometimes in money. A callout can build a following. Sometimes that following is deserved and the fall was overdue. The same opportunities exist when the target has little power, which is the part people with growing audiences have the least interest in examining. A damning reading of thin evidence can win attention before anyone has established whether it's true, and the person who makes the accusation may already have received whatever social reward was available by the time somebody bothers to check.
Joining pays the joiner too, even with nothing to grow. Being among the first to share, or to say the right thing in the right thread, marks you as someone paying attention who sided correctly. In a scene where reputation is most of the available currency, that's worth having. Staying out can cost you something when silence gets read as sympathy for the target. Participation then spreads through people who have never met the person and have no direct stake in the complaint.
Once a thread builds momentum, the subject can drift. It starts with something the person did and moves on to their appearance or the way they talk, details with no connection to whatever harm anyone was originally trying to prevent. Strangers acquire a stake in being seen to have an opinion, even as the complaint that supposedly justified their involvement disappears from the discussion. When the original complaint has been quietly dropped and the pile keeps growing, nobody is working on accountability anymore.
The person who was actually hurt can lose control of her own account. A woman who says a man hurt her may be hoping to be believed or kept safe from him, and what she gets instead is her worst day turned into everybody's content. The strangers arguing in the replies can use her story to show which side they're on without asking what she wants shared. A pile-on can take away the last say she had over who knew and how. An accountability process has to take her decisions seriously, including a decision to speak publicly, while making safety planning possible if she wants nothing to do with the process.
The vocabulary is the grossest part, because condemnation can arrive dressed as care. People can say they're protecting community safety while organizing consequences that have no clear protective purpose. Sarah Schulman's argument in Conflict Is Not Abuse follows the escalation that happens when ordinary conflict is relabeled as abuse and a person's allies reinforce the claim without examining it. Her account helps explain how a disagreement can become an accusation serious enough to justify collective intervention, although applying it to any particular relationship still requires evidence. You can believe someone enough to offer support without automatically agreeing that every consequence proposed in her name is justified. \[17\]
An improvised accountability circle can take on powers its participants aren't equipped to exercise. If the people deciding an allegation are personally invested in the outcome, the accused may have no meaningful opportunity to respond, and the process may have no way to correct a mistaken decision. Courts and HR departments routinely fail those standards themselves. Abolitionist organizers have developed alternatives, including the Creative Interventions Toolkit, with guidance on setting goals and reviewing an intervention as it develops. Those resources exist, and a scene that substitutes fast expulsion for that work can't treat its own improvisation as the full extent of transformative justice. Acting decisively against someone the group dislikes can look like leadership, while the slow case that ends with a changed person produces very little applause. \[18\]
The critique of callout culture's excesses also gets captured by people it ought to expose. Every abuser with a podcast seems to have an episode on how accountability culture went too far. Someone who genuinely harmed people can gesture at process concerns to avoid the substance of what he did, making criticism of a pile-on easy to frame as cover for him. Public warnings are sometimes necessary, and exclusion can be exactly right. A community that can't keep someone away from people he's endangering is failing them. His ability to exploit a criticism doesn't make the criticism false, and it doesn't answer the allegation against him either.
Proportionality becomes difficult to discuss when asking whether a consequence goes too far is treated as denying the harm. Genuine wrongdoing can become the warrant for unlimited consequences, even though the truth of the original complaint can't establish the necessity of everything that follows. Consider a man whose exclusion from a particular space was warranted, but whose continued blacklisting from income and housing years later is producing serious distress for him and the people who depend on him. Whether that deprivation protects anyone requires a fresh examination. The severity of the original harm can't answer the question by itself, and the people organizing continued exclusion have a responsibility to explain its purpose.
Doubt gets punished too. A single question about the evidence can make the thread turn to consider you, since doubt reads as sympathy and sympathy reads as complicity. People who might otherwise question the response say nothing, their silence gets counted as agreement, and the pile-on looks unanimous because everyone who might have slowed it is busy keeping their own name off the next document.
Who can afford to lose those networks shapes how the consequences fall. A person with savings and institutional backing has ways to survive being expelled that someone dependent on a scene doesn't. In feminist and activist spaces, a Black trans woman can arrive with little protection and few people willing to take a hit to stand next to her. Her sharpness can get read as menace when a softer, whiter woman's identical sharpness gets read as having good boundaries. A stated commitment to protecting the vulnerable has to survive that distribution of credibility and support.
I've been on both sides of this, and pretending otherwise would be a lie. Early on I had a large platform and used it to mock a woman I'd never met, for free, because it was easy and it played. She blocked me, and I didn't care. After I was canceled myself, I went back and decided she was right. I wouldn't have found that out without being on the receiving end. People who announce they could never watch a firing squad may find it easier to keep all of this abstract when it hasn't been their turn yet.
### IV. YOU'RE AN ABOLITIONIST UNTIL IT'S SOMEONE YOU FUCKING HATE.
The hardest case for abolition is the one where the person is guilty and almost nobody wants mercy for him. Hasan killed thirteen people at Fort Hood, admitted that he was the shooter, and was convicted of their murders. There's no mistaken identity to organize the argument around. He's exactly who supporters say the death penalty is for, and the government has proposed killing him in front of a worldwide audience. You still shouldn't want that. Abolitionists can make a compelling case through wrongful convictions, but the test also includes what you believe when the person is guilty and you hate him. If opposition to state killing disappears the moment someone commits an atrocity, the state's authority to kill remains intact while you argue about who qualifies. \[1\]
Slavery shaped the American penal system, and its reorganization after emancipation helps explain why abolition is a materialist question. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude with an exception for punishment following a criminal conviction. Southern states used discriminatory laws to criminalize Black freedom, feeding a convict-leasing system that supplied coerced labor to private employers. Vagrancy laws made people without recognized employment especially vulnerable. Angela Davis follows that history in Are Prisons Obsolete?, showing how imprisonment and forced labor helped reproduce racial domination after formal emancipation. Prisons and executions both predated that system, but the use of criminal law to control Black labor transformed what punishment could do for the people who benefited from it. \[19\]
W.E.B. Du Bois argued in Black Reconstruction that abolishing slavery required institutions capable of making freedom materially real. Access to education mattered alongside the struggle for economic independence and political power. Ruth Wilson Gilmore follows the production of racial inequality into the contemporary prison system. In Golden Gulag, she defines racism through the state-sanctioned or extralegal production of unequal vulnerability to premature death. That definition includes the conditions that leave particular people exposed to violence long before anyone gathers to watch them die. Abolition therefore requires sustained investment in the means of living, including housing and care. The work is harder to package as a decisive event than a firing squad, and it continues long after the crowd has gone home. \[20–21\]
Mariame Kaba's work in We Do This 'Til We Free Us keeps pressing on the practical question of what accountability requires. The person who did harm has to face what they did and participate in repair where repair is possible. Change has to become observable in how they behave. Someone harmed needs support and recognition that what happened to her was real, regardless of whether the person responsible cooperates. Those projects don't automatically run on the same timeline, and nobody gets to make a survivor's care conditional on his transformation. Punishment can produce suffering without accomplishing any of that work. \[22\]
A survivor needs somewhere safe to live and enough economic stability to make choices about her situation. The person doing harm also needs somewhere to go while he changes, with resources adequate to whatever support the process requires. A community that announces transformative justice and offers only a meeting hasn't supplied those conditions. When the meeting fails, people can go back to expulsion and call it evidence that abolition doesn't work. Resources don't guarantee success, since a participant may refuse to change and violence can continue during an intervention. Safety has to be assessed throughout, with the ability to stop a process that's making things worse. Good intentions can't substitute for the resources or judgment the work requires. \[18\]
Rehabilitation is where the politics gets most honest about its commitments. The belief is easy to hold for someone sympathetic and harder to sustain for someone the community despises. Continuing to provide the conditions for change may require years of work without applause, with a real chance that it doesn't work. A person who is white and visibly contrite can receive patience that a Black person angry about the process struggles to obtain. Treating that anger as proof that change is impossible lets the community give up without examining its own allocation of support. The slogan that no one is disposable gets tested by the person nobody wants to defend.
Rehabilitation also doesn't entitle anyone to restored access to every relationship or institution they previously occupied. A person can change substantially while the people they harmed remain unwilling to be near them. Nobody owes renewed intimacy as proof of their abolitionist credentials. Exclusion from a particular context can remain necessary, and supporting someone's change doesn't require returning them to the people they've hurt. A wider ban on the means of living requires its own justification, which a survivor's decision to end a relationship doesn't automatically supply.
Some people will refuse every voluntary process offered to them. They may use an accountability circle to relitigate their innocence and exhaust the people trying to do the work. Protective boundaries have to remain possible without requiring a survivor to negotiate indefinitely. A restriction needs a defined scope and someone answerable for its effects, especially when it reaches beyond an individual's decision about their own relationships. Calling it protective doesn't exempt it from scrutiny. Otherwise, a community can reproduce indefinite punishment while assuring itself that every exclusion is necessary for safety.
The principle can be harder to practice around your friends than against the state. In an abolitionist circle, declining to cheer for a firing squad may cost you nothing. The harder moment is the Tuesday when a document goes up, everyone you eat with is already sure, and the easiest sentence to type is the one that agrees. Kaba's "hope is a discipline" has practical force here. It requires continuing to ask what a consequence will accomplish when asking that question will cost you something in the room you're standing in. \[22\]
Saidiya Hartman refused, at the start of Scenes of Subjection, to reproduce Frederick Douglass's account of his Aunt Hester being whipped. She questioned the ease with which scenes of enslaved Black people's suffering circulated, including in accounts intended to condemn slavery. The spectator's emotional response could become the center of the encounter, displacing the person whose suffering produced it. Her analysis raises a question about the politics of representation: who gets to use another person's pain, and what does that use enable? \[23\]
Hasan is Palestinian American, and his case has its own history; Hartman's analysis of slavery can't simply be transferred onto his execution. Her question about what an audience's feelings do still bears on a government arranging a broadcast. Survivors also have views that complicate any neat account of what witnessing means. Alonzo Lunsford, whom Hasan shot seven times, told ABC News that he supports the execution and wants to attend, while objecting to an unrestricted public livestream. His position separates a survivor's wish to witness from the government's proposal to offer the death to everyone. I oppose the execution, including the one he wants, but his account prevents me from pretending that survivors all need the same thing. Taking them seriously includes providing care without requiring agreement on punishment. \[24\]
People can feel satisfaction when someone they believe deserves punishment is punished. I feel it too. The question is what authority that feeling should have over another person's future. Collective confidence can accompany an accurate judgment or a disastrous one, so it can't establish what a consequence will accomplish. That requires a process whose decisions can be examined and revised, with continuing obligations to the people harmed by them.
Hasan has to be prevented from harming anyone else. That obligation supplies no reason to kill a person already in custody, whether the state broadcasts the death or closes the door. Any restriction on him still requires justification and review; calling it safety doesn't settle how he should be treated for the rest of his life. The government's proposed camera makes its invitation obvious. In our own communities, it takes more work to see when we've accepted a similar permission to stop asking what our actions are doing. Refusing to watch is a decision about your attention. An abolitionist commitment has to reach the point where you give up a punishment you could help impose, even when the person would never thank you and everyone around you thinks they fucking deserve it.
### WORKS CITED
1\. Reuters, [“US to livestream Army firing squad execution of Fort Hood shooter, Pentagon says”](https://www.reuters.com/world/us-livestream-army-execution-fort-hood-shooter-pentagon-official-says-2026-10-08/), October 8, 2026; Death Penalty Information Center, [“Nidal Hasan May Be Executed on December 3 by Firing Squad”](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/nidal-hasan-may-be-executed-on-december-3-by-firing-squad-first-military-execution-in-65-years), October 7, 2026; The Washington Post, [“Trump says he will 'make a decision' on Hegseth plan to live-stream execution”](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/10/10/trump-make-decision-hegseth-plan-live-streamed-public-execution/), October 10, 2026.
2\. London Museum, [“London's public executions”](https://www.londonmuseum.org.uk/collections/london-stories/londons-public-executions/); Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, Tales from the Hanging Court (2006), [section on Tyburn](https://uhra.herts.ac.uk/id/eprint/12257/10/005-Hanging_20Court-cpp.pdf).
3\. London Lives, [“Ordinary's Accounts: Biographies of Executed Convicts”](https://old.londonlives.org/static/OA.jsp).
4\. Sarah Tarlow and Emma Battell Lowman, [“Murder and the Law, 1752–1832”](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-77908-9_4), in Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse (2018).
5\. Daniel A. Cohen, interview in BackStory, [“Court of Public Opinion”](https://backstory.newamericanhistory.org/episodes/court-of-public-opinion/).
6\. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), translated by Alan Sheridan (1977), particularly “The Body of the Condemned” and “The Spectacle of the Scaffold.”
7\. Charles Dickens, [letter to the editors of the Daily News, February 28, 1846](https://dickensletters.com/editors-daily-news-28-feb-1846); [letter to The Times, November 13, 1849](https://victorianlondon.org/prisons/execution.htm).
8\. Dictionary of Irish Biography, [“Barrett, Michael”](https://www.dib.ie/index.php/biography/barrett-michael-a0415); Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868, 31 & 32 Vict. c. 24.
9\. Death Penalty Information Center, [“Kentucky”](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/state-and-federal-info/state-by-state/kentucky); Associated Press, [“Public executions in the US were once a community spectacle and then they stopped”](https://apnews.com/article/fort-hood-livestream-history-public-execution-e9b41d2c6425aa75e25e65dddc91ab7b), October 9, 2026.
10\. National Institute of Justice, [“Five Things About Deterrence”](https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/five-things-about-deterrence).
11\. Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), book I, chapter 2; The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), chapter 3.
12\. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, [Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14975/14975-h/14975-h.htm) (1892); [A Red Record](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14977/14977-h/14977-h.htm) (1895).
13\. James M. SoRelle, [“Jesse Washington Lynching”](https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/jesse-washington-lynching), Handbook of Texas Online; Patricia Bernstein, The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP (2005).
14\. Equal Justice Initiative, [Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror](https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/), third edition (2017).
15\. James Allen, editor, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000); [postcard catalog entry](https://withoutsanctuary.com/pics_22_picback/).
16\. Texas Historical Commission, [“The Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington”](https://atlas.thc.texas.gov/Details?atlasnumber=5000018585&fn=print), historical marker (2016).
17\. Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016).
18\. Creative Interventions, [Creative Interventions Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Stop Interpersonal Violence](https://www.creative-interventions.org/toolkit/).
19\. Angela Y. Davis, [Are Prisons Obsolete?](https://sevenstories.com/books/2907-are-prisons-obsolete) (2003); U.S. Constitution, Thirteenth Amendment.
20\. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), especially “Looking Forward”; Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy (2005).
21\. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, [Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California](https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520242012/golden-gulag) (2007), p. 28.
22\. Mariame Kaba, [We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice](https://books.google.com/books/about/We_Do_This_Til_We_Free_Us.html?id=ShMIEAAAQBAJ) (2021).
23\. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), [introduction](https://collabscoopscoalitions.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/hartman_introduction-scenes-of-subjection.pdf).
24\. Catherine Alaimo, ABC News, [“Fort Hood survivors speak out on Pentagon's decision to livestream Hasan's execution”](https://abcnews.com/Politics/fort-hood-survivors-speak-pentagons-decision-livestream-hasans/story?id=137144236), October 10, 2026; Associated Press reporting carried by The Guardian, [“Trump approves firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter, Pentagon says”](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/05/trump-fort-hood-shooter-execution), October 5, 2026.