"Death in prison a certainty for Hasan BY EDITORIAL BOARD Nidal Hasan’s legal journey is far from over, though his fate is certain. He is not leaving prison alive. If anyone deserves to be put to death for their crime, it is Hasan, though in our view, and in line with our longstanding opposition to the death penalty, justice doesn’t require executing him. A military jury of 13 senior officers sentenced the 42-year-old Army psychiatrist to death Wednesday for killing 13 people and wounding 32 others at Fort Hood on Nov. 5, 2009. Hasan betrayed his duty to his country and his fellow soldiers, and he left behind immeasurable grief, which was expressed heartbreakingly during his trial by Shoua Her when she told jurors how empty her life has been since Hasan murdered her husband, Pfc. Kham Xiong. “I feel dead but yet alive,” she said. Hasan is headed to the military’s death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he will stay while automatic appeals demanded by the military’s code of justice play out over the next several years, perhaps decades. Paralyzed from the waist down when police officers ended his attack by shooting him, Hasan is as likely to die from age and health complications associated with his paralysis as he is to die from lethal injection, the military’s official method of execution. Military law governing death penalty cases prevented Hasan from pleading guilty, as he wanted to do. He was allowed to represent himself at his court-martial at Fort Hood, though he presented no defense and admitted the obvious when he declared himself “the shooter” during his brief opening statement. He practically spent his three-week trial, which finally arrived after a series of frustrating delays, steering jurors toward their inevitable guilty verdict and not unsurprising death sentence. Hasan, a Muslim born in Virginia who was scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan when he committed his act of terror, had wanted to say he planned his attack to protect Muslims from American soldiers engaged in a war in Afghanistan he considered illegal and immoral. He had wanted to use a “defense of others” argument that is similar to self-defense but involves protecting a third person from imminent threat rather than oneself. Col. Tara Osborn, the military judge who presided over Hasan’s court-martial with great care, refused to let him pursue that strategy. Multiple mandatory appeals follow a death sentence under the military’s code of criminal justice. Hasan, who will be one of only six inmates on Fort Leavenworth’s death row, will not be allowed to represent himself during what is certain to be a long appeals process. The military last executed one of its inmates shortly after midnight on April 13, 1961, when the Army hanged Pvt. John Bennett for raping and attempting to drown an 11-year-old Austrian girl. The closest the military has come to executing an inmate since Bennett’s hanging was in 2008, when Ronald Gray, an Army specialist convicted in 1988 of raping and killing two women, an Army private and a civilian cab driver, and of raping and attempting to kill another Army private, was scheduled to die. Gray was granted a stay two weeks before his execution date, and his case has been under further appeal ever since. The military’s code of criminal justice requires the president, as commander-in-chief, to approve a military death sentence before an execution can take place. Days before the Army hanged Bennett, his victim and her parents wrote President John F. Kennedy asking him to grant Bennett mercy. “Even his execution could not eradicate what has happened,” Bennett’s victim, then a teenager, wrote. Kennedy rejected the wise words of Bennett’s victim — an execution does not change the past, nor does it change a survivor’s altered present and future — and refused to spare Bennett’s life. As long as the military justice system grinds its way toward determining his fate, Hasan will sit in his wheelchair, facing a slow, lonely rot in prison, delusional in his faith. The martyrdom he expected to find when he pulled the trigger on his handgun more than 200 times, ending and disrupting lives better than his own, will remain a broken promise. And whichever way his end comes, by needle or by nature, few will mourn Nidal Hasan."
Posted on: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 12:19:53 +0000
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