1/ The Pentagon plans to carry out the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan in public and stream it live. NACDL condemns it as an affront to human dignity on legal ground no U.S. court has ever tested, and renews its call to end the death penalty. 🧵

10/ NACDL's full statement:

9/ Owen: "NACDL opposes the death penalty in all circumstances… We call on the administration to abandon this execution, and we renew our call to end capital punishment. No person, however reviled, is the government's to kill as a spectacle."

8/ Wayne: "Guatemala broadcast executions on live television in the 1990s… Guatemala has carried out no execution since 2000. Today, even the regimes that still kill in public, including Iran, the Taliban, and North Korea, do not stream it live. This proposal would stand alone."

7/ Wayne: "When South Carolina executed Mikal Mahdi by firing squad in April 2025, his lawyers, citing a forensic pathologist's review of the autopsy, said the shooters largely missed his heart, leaving him conscious and in pain for close to a minute. Now imagine that broadcast to the world."

6/ Wayne: "Courts have upheld the state's power to keep cameras out and have found no right to televise an execution. No U.S. court has ever confronted the reverse: a government that chooses to broadcast one itself in real time."

5/ NACDL Executive Director Lisa M. Wayne: "Mr. Hasan represented himself, called no witnesses, presented no mitigation, and made no argument for his own life… Here, no one did… in a capital case the cost of getting it wrong is irreversible."

4/ Owen: "Nidal Hasan is a Muslim American of Palestinian descent. Livestreaming his death makes it look less like justice than vengeance… The state should give no one cause to see it that way."

3/ Owen: "This nation knows what public killing looks like: crowds at the gallows, photographs of the dead sold as souvenir postcards, and at its worst, the racial terror of thousands of Black Americans lynched as spectacle."

2/ NACDL President C. Melissa "Missy" Owen: "The government is planning to kill a man on camera for the country to watch in real time… We moved executions behind prison walls to leave that history behind."

1/ The Pentagon plans to carry out the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan in public and stream it live. NACDL condemns it as an affront to human dignity on legal ground no U.S. court has ever tested, and renews its call to end the death penalty. 🧵

6/6 What's next: legal experts expect many more challenges like this across the country as Chatrie reshapes how courts treat digital location tracking. NACDL's Fourth Amendment Center — which helped litigate Chatrie — is at the center of that fight.

5/6 Thaxter: the ruling "correctly recognized that Chatrie holds that our location history is constitutionally protected and a warrant is required to track our physical movements." The parallels between cellphone and plate-reader records, he said, "practically leap off the page."

4/6 Sidney Thaxter, senior litigator at NACDL's Fourth Amendment Center, on why it matters: "ALPR networks run against us all even if we have not committed a crime and allow police to retroactively track our whereabouts with the press of a few buttons."

3/6 Why it's a big deal: for years, courts let police run plate-reader searches without a warrant, reasoning public roads carry no privacy. Hill broke from that — one of the first federal rulings that searching historic ALPR data can violate the Fourth Amendment, built directly on Chatrie.

2/6 The stop: a Tulsa County deputy pulled over Melisa Kyle mainly for a California plate, then used Flock's national network to pull 50 sightings of her car across a month. Judge Sara Hill called it "indiscriminate mass surveillance," a warrantless search — and suppressed the evidence.

1/6 A federal judge in Oklahoma threw out Flock license-plate-reader evidence, ruling a warrantless search of a month of a driver's movements unconstitutional — citing June's Supreme Court Chatrie decision. First of its kind:

6/6 NACDL opposes the death penalty and is calling for it to end. In the association's own statement, Johnson said: "The state cannot make killing humane, because the killing itself is the inhumanity." Our full statement:

5/6 Experts call it uncharted territory. One death-penalty lawyer argues a second attempt, after she already suffered the drugs, could be torture barred by the Eighth Amendment. The clearest off-ramp, another says, is for the governor to commute her sentence.

4/6 A likely first hurdle is competency. Pike regained consciousness about six days after the attempt — her team had believed she was brain dead — and awoke aware of what had happened, distressed and disoriented. Johnson expects years of litigation over whether she's even competent to be executed.