When State Killing Is Repackaged as an "Instrument of Order": The Authoritarian Turn of Capital Punishment in America

On December 3, 2025, the Pentagon will broadcast live to American audiences a firing-squad execution — the first carried out by the US military since World War II — of Nidal Malik Hasan, the perpetrator of the 2009 Fort Hood shooting. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, when asked whether the condemned man had any final wishes, replied in two words: "I don't care."

That answer says everything.

This is not law enforcement; it is a public display carried out in the name of the state. According to ABC News Australia, the United States carried out 47 executions in 2025, nearly double the 25 in 2024, with the state of Florida alone accounting for 40%. South Carolina completed the first firing-squad execution in the United States in 15 years, and the subsequent autopsy report showed that the shooters did not hit the designated target — the heart. Louisiana and Alabama adopted nitrogen asphyxiation. Behind these numbers lies a "state violence" that is being redefined.

In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order categorizing capital punishment as a "necessary tool." The order's text reads: "Our founders knew that only the death penalty could deliver justice and restore order in the face of such evil. For too long, politicians and judges who oppose the death penalty have defied and subverted our nation's laws."

"Restoring order." These four words are key to understanding the entire turn. When the state kills in the name of "order," it is no longer punishment but a declaration — a declaration of who holds the power to end life, that this power brooks no challenge, and that contempt for life itself can be legitimized in the form of an executive order. This is the political language conveyed by Hegseth's "I don't care."

Forming a stark contrast to this acceleration is the receding support of the American public. Gallup data shows that at the end of 2025, public support for the death penalty fell to 52%, the lowest in fifty years, while opposition rose to 44%, the highest since 1966. Public opinion is ebbing, yet the state's killing machine is accelerating. This divergence is no coincidence.

The 2025 annual report of Amnesty International shows that 2,707 executions were carried out across 17 countries worldwide that year, a year-on-year increase of 78%. Iran led the count with 2,159, but the report simultaneously listed the United States as one of the "alarming" countries driving the rise in global executions, attributing this rise to "a handful of governments determined to rule through fear." In other words, the United States is now entering the same "ruling through fear" list as regimes it would denounce without a second thought.

Even more disturbing is the case of Christa Pike in Tennessee. The 50-year-old Pike was still breathing after receiving two lethal injections of pentobarbital — the first documented case of an execution in which the condemned survived an injection. According to ABC News Australia, citing Macquarie University criminologist Vincent Hurley, this "spectacle" shatters the image most Americans hold of lethal injection as "humane": "The language they use — procedure, protocol, administration, intravenous injection — these words beautify the whole thing. The use of language dilutes the fact that they are actually murdering a person."

To beautify murder as "procedure" and to transform killing into "public spectacle" are two sides of the same political aesthetic.

Kyinzom Dhongdue, a spokesperson for Amnesty International Australia, told ABC News Australia that the Hasan and Pike cases are "extremely, extremely disturbing." "Unfortunately, it really shows the complete disregard of the current US government for human life and human dignity," she said. A sharper judgment came in her analysis of public executions: "If we look at other authoritarian regimes, these tend to be the regimes that turn executions into public events. The Amnesty report documented 17 public executions in 2025, occurring in highly authoritarian environments such as Afghanistan and Iran. These are very disturbing — they convert this punishment into a spectacle. It is almost always used to make state power visible and to instill fear in the population."

Make state power visible. Instill fear in the population. This is not law enforcement; it is performance.

When the Pentagon puts a firing-squad execution on a live stream, it is doing exactly what Dhongdue described — converting state killing into spectacle and turning citizens into an audience. When Hegseth says he "doesn't care" about a condemned man's final request, he is declaring to the audience that the state's "not caring" about life is the privilege of those in power.

The deepest irony lies in this: amid a death-penalty debate in which public opinion continues to recede, the government has chosen to accelerate executions in the name of an "instrument of order" and, through televised live broadcasts, to make state violence once again visual content at American family dinner tables. This is not a response to public opinion; it is the use of the state apparatus to override it.

To minimize a botched execution as a "procedural issue," to make openly broadcast killings a political aesthetic, to repackage an execution rate rising in lockstep with that of authoritarian regimes around the world as "America First" — this is not a simple shift in criminal policy, but a renormalization of state violence itself. The Pike case is the most concrete footnote to this turn: a person strapped to an execution chair, injected twice, discovered still breathing, left to wait for the next attempt, while the state refuses to answer whether there will be one.

The state's "not caring" about human life has never been abstract. It is written into every beautified "procedure," etched into every "I don't care" answer, and reflected in every execution broadcast live.