I worked on death row for 18 years. This is why the livestream execution was cancelled

Since the US Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, state and federal authorities have executed 1,684 individuals.

For half a century, this violence has been conducted with clinical distance – shrouded in quiet, standardised procedure.

When defence secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the execution of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan would be broadcast live to the world, that bureaucratic veneer dissolved.

Labeled by the United Nations as “tantamount to a public execution” – a spectacle unseen in American justice for nearly a century – the Pentagon’s proposal transformed state-sanctioned killing into primetime political theatre.

Donald Trump has since backtracked, reversing the decision to stream the execution following international condemnation and internal political friction.

But for Dr Asim Qureshi, director of CAGE International, who has spent two decades navigating the legal mechanics of America’s death row, viewing this retreat as a victory for human decency is to misunderstand how the Trump administration operates. ‘

The policy balloon has been floated, the precedent logged, and the public appetite tested.

“Mine was quite a reaction of horror,” Dr Qureshi says, reflecting on the initial announcement of the live streaming. “It’s presented as accountability, transparency, justice – but at the heart of it, it is this fascination with wanting to show power. This administration is built on the optics of projecting power.”

When a government seeks to broadcast a state killing, it relies on a specific, fragile logic: that absolute dominance can be demonstrated through controlled violence.

The White House’s sudden U-turn exposes the inherent risk of that calculation. Unfiltered spectacle is a political “wild card”, which, once broadcast, cannot be controlled.

“I think one of the main reasons it was cancelled is that the Trump administration has discovered that livestreaming horror doesn’t really work,” Dr Qureshi explains, pointing to the shift in global consciousness over recent years.

“For the past three years, we’ve watched a livestreamed genocide. And because of it, opinions toward Israel – across both the Democrat and Republican parties – are at an all-time low.”

In criminal defence, “mitigation” is the methodical reconstruction of a defendant’s life to understand the factors that brought them to the moment of their crime. In bringing a camera into the execution chamber, the state unwittingly invites the public to conduct its own act of mitigation.

“To livestream an execution would force people to mitigate and reassess the case of Nidal Hasan,” Dr Qureshi states.

“When it comes to it, Nidal Hasan’s issue was with American malfeasance across the world – his reasons were rooted in American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I don’t think Trump, or anyone in his administration, wants people asking those questions.”

This creates “a bizarre duality” for the White House: where the desire to punish Hasan for his actions must be reconciled with the possibility that Americans may interrogate what led to them.

But even in the cancellation of the livestream, the proposal has already changed the course of American justice. By floating the idea of a televised execution, the state has expanded the boundaries of what violence can be considered “just”.

“If you want to shift public opinion, you need to bring the most egregious act to the table,” Dr Qureshi explains. “And bit by bit, the mainstream narrative will move toward the next, slightly less egregious thing.

“It’s worked, because everybody is talking about whether Nidal Hasan’s execution should be livestreamed, but nobody’s talking about why he is being executed in the first place.

“And in doing so, it has made a future livestreamed execution a much more realistic possibility.”

But this baseline has never been a just one.

“We are looking at a country where 98 per cent of criminal defendants are coerced into plea deals, where one third of Black men face the shadow of incarceration, and where children lose years of their lives to wrongful convictions,” explains Dr Qureshi.

“This is not a system suffering from administrative flaws. It is an unjust system.

“This livestreamed execution is not indicative of anything other than the direction that American justice is barreling toward.

“And there will be no justice without a fundamental rethink.”