Why America stopped showing executions: The 1936 Kentucky hanging that sparked a ban, and what a Hasan firing squad livestream could change 90 years later

The Army has set Dec. 3 for the execution of Nidal Hasan, the former Army major convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting. Hasan killed 13 people and wounded 32. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the firing squad will be livestreamed. It would be the first U.S. military execution in more than six decades.

President Trump has backed the idea as a deterrent. “By showing it, other people maybe won’t be doing what he did,” he said. On Hasan himself, he was blunter. He doesn’t care how Hasan goes, only that he goes.

Almost no one disputes Hasan’s guilt. The argument is about the audience.

90 years after Kentucky’s infamous hanging, a planned execution livestream revives America’s debate over public punishment

The last fully public execution in the United States took place in Owensboro, Kentucky, on Aug. 14, 1936. Rainey Bethea was hanged for rape in a parking lot. Estimates put the crowd between 10,000 and 20,000 people. They arrived by car, bus and train.

The case drew national attention for another reason. The sheriff in charge of the hanging was Florence Thompson, a widowed mother of four. Reporters came from across the country, and many of them wrote about the crowd rather than the condemned man.

The crowd was thick enough that people climbed poles to see over it.

Sonya Lea, an author whose grandparents were there, says some people treated the night like a party. They called them “necktie parties.” Alcohol sales were set to stop after midnight, and the hanging was scheduled for 5 a.m. Some people simply slept at the site.

Press accounts at the time called it a “brutal carnival,” Lea says. A photo in The Courier Journal showed Bethea eating pie and ice cream from his last meal.

The trial raises its own questions. Bethea spent one day in court in Daviess County and was otherwise held in the old Louisville jail. A team of Black lawyers in Louisville later argued that his Owensboro defense attorneys had given up too easily on his guilty plea. According to Lea, there was no opening statement and no closing statement.

Lea’s grandparents attended but did not carry the horror that other witnesses did. She wrote about the hanging in her book “American Bloodlines.” She says she still thinks about what an older woman told her. The woman had run into Bethea near the gallows and heard him say, “I didn’t do this.” The woman had to live with that for the rest of her life.

The backlash was fast. Public executions were outlawed in Kentucky within a couple of years. Accounts differ slightly on the exact date and mechanism. One report says the legislature acted in 1937. Another says that two years after the hanging, the state stopped requiring hangings for rape convictions. Either way, executions moved indoors. That is where they have stayed for almost a century.

In 1936, the crowd was limited by what a parking lot could hold. A livestream has no such limit.

Lea calls Bethea’s hanging a “legal lynching.” She thinks the scale of a modern broadcast is the point people miss. Twenty thousand people watched in Owensboro, she says. Online, the audience never stops growing. “It’s forever,” she said.

That is a different kind of record. A photograph from 1936 sits in a library archive. A video can be copied, clipped and reposted indefinitely, and no one decides who sees it or when. The Pentagon has not said, in the material available here, how it would control or archive the footage.

The deterrence argument is also untested. Trump’s claim is that showing an execution may discourage future attacks. The Owensboro record points the other way. What the 1936 crowd produced was disgust, and the disgust changed the law. The newspapers covered the spectators as much as the sentence.

Hasan’s case also differs from Bethea’s in one clear way. Bethea’s guilt was contested by lawyers who said his defense was weak. Hasan’s is not. That makes the question narrower, and perhaps harder. If the verdict is certain, the only thing left to debate is the display.

Kentucky answered that question in 1936 by closing the gate. The Pentagon is about to answer it differently.