If the Nidal Hasan Execution Is Livestreamed, We Are a Barbaric Nation

The only countries to carry out public executions in 2025? Iran and Afghanitisan. That’s the company Pete Hegseth wants America to keep.

Very early on the morning of August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky, Rainey Bethea woke up for the last time. He was a young Black man—Wikipedia pegs his age at the time at 27, while another more authoritative-seeming source I read said he was 22—who had lost his mother and father while young and drifted into a life of itinerant labor and, eventually, crime. Earlier that summer, he broke into the home of 70-year-old Lishia Edwards, who was white. He raped her and killed her and stole some of her jewelry. Or at least it seems like he did—he confessed more than once, but never in the presence of counsel, and at one point he told police he was drunk at the time of his first confession. But a ring was found at the scene that did belong to him.

His execution, by hanging, was set for sunrise that mid-August day. A crowd of 20,000 gathered; vendors sold candy, popcorn, Coca-Cola, and watermelon; some men climbed utility poles, and parents held their small children aloft, for a better view. The Louisville Courier-Journal enthused: “Kentucky is already famous for her hospitality. Her Derby parties are known all over the country. Her hanging parties should have an even wider fame. Most people are interested in horse-racing, but all people are interested in death.”

Coverage was national and intense. The Northern papers were horrified by this macabre spectacle (here’s a photo of the scene). The people of Owensboro resented the way they were portrayed. But the state legislature and the governor had enough of a conscience that not long after, they passed a law outlawing public executions. And the hanging of Rainey Bethea was, by most accounts, the last public execution in the United States (the Death Penalty Information Center’s website says that one........

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