Amnesty International official condemns US plan for public execution

Frank Johansson, head of the Finland office of the human rights organisation Amnesty International, has criticised the US government's decision to broadcast a convicted person's execution live. He made the remarks on the Finnish public broadcaster's programme Ylen Aamu. He called the plan "absolutely horrible" and noted that the United States has not held public executions for more than a hundred years.

What is planned

Earlier this week, the US Department of Defense announced that President Donald Trump had approved an execution by firing squad. The sentence is to be carried out by a military firing squad. The convicted man is Major Nidal Hasan, a former US Army psychiatrist who shot and killed 13 people at a military base in Texas in 2009. The execution is scheduled for 3 December 2026 at Fort Hood in Texas. It would be the first public execution in the US in nearly a century.

The criticism

Johansson pointed out that public executions have been carried out in the 21st century in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, and in China in the 1980s. He disputed the argument that the death penalty deters crime. According to him, research shows it makes society more violent and contributes to a rise in violent crime. He said it can be seen as endorsing violence, since the state kills a person who is already in custody and no longer poses a danger.

Johansson described the death penalty as a cruel and inhumane punishment. Once a sentence is carried out, a mistake cannot be corrected, and even an innocent person can be put to death. In his view, the only real basis for capital punishment is revenge. He asked whether a modern justice system should be built on the principle of "an eye for an eye", and recalled that Europe rejected this approach as early as the Enlightenment.