Nancy Welch was driving to the barn to see her horses when news of a planned livestreamed execution came over her car stereo. The barn is where she normally goes for an escape. This time, she couldn’t.
So when President Donald Trump called off the livestream Thursday, Welch felt some relief. But that wasn’t the point. Not entirely, at least.
“We won’t face the horror of an execution turned into a grisly public spectacle, but we should still feel revulsion that the execution by firing squad will still take place,” said Welch, who lived in Vermont for 27 years, taught at the University of Vermont and was a vocal advocate against the death penalty. Welch now lives in New Hampshire.
Trump’s reversal Thursday followed bipartisan criticism of plans to broadcast the Dec. 3 execution of Nidal Hasan, convicted of killing 13 people at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009.
But while the livestream proposal united some critics across political lines, capital punishment itself remains far more divisive. Some Vermonters believe the controversy has shifted attention away from the longstanding debate over whether the death penalty should be used at all.
When Paul Dame, chair of the Vermont Republican Party, got the news, he was of two minds.
Although Dame knows many in his party support the death penalty, he said he personally cannot get behind it. Even after horrible crimes, he believes in the possibility of redemption.
“For me, ending, you know, ending a life is a really serious endeavor,” Dame said. “And it’s one I know I’m not sure we should take lightly.”
This case, however, is an “uncommon event and an uncommon crime,” Dame said, adding that it is “the closest thing we have to a real case of treason.”
“When you have a military member who has security clearance and access to a military base where military families live, and they turn on the people supporting them, it’s hard to imagine a crime worthy of greater punishment,” Dame said.
But livestreaming the spectacle felt to Dame to be a step too far, he said, particularly considering the fact that Hasan was paralyzed in the course of his capture and now uses a wheelchair.
“We don’t need to create a public spectacle out of something like that,” Dame said.
The decision could also have fed Hasan’s desired goal of martyrdom, according to Abe Bonowitz, executive director of Death Penalty Action, a national organization dedicated to ending the death penalty. To broadcast this execution would be to elevate it, which is often the goal of terrorist actions, he said.
“How many of us are going to know the names of any one of the 13 people that died or the 32 people that were injured?” Bonowitz said. “Everybody’s going to know his name.”
Bonowitz also argued that the timing of the announcement seemed politically significant.
“We are glad that the President succumbed to the pressure he received even from death penalty supporters, but let’s not lose sight of what this is really about,” Bonowitz later wrote in a text to VTDigger, adding that this case served as a distraction from the economy, the Iran war and the upcoming elections.
Lori Hibbard, the daughter of Teresca King, a Vermont woman who was abducted and killed by Donald Fell in 2000, wrote in a text to VTDigger that she wasn’t opposed to a public execution, although as a mother she would not let her kids watch it.
Still, Hibbard said she was skeptical of whether the livestream would act as a deterrent for future crimes, though she empathized with the families involved with the Fort Hood case.
“I know what it’s like to be a victim of random acts of violence,” Hibbard said. “Stays with you forever.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who said his goal was to show the consequences of actions like Hasan’s, originally proposed streaming the execution. Bonowitz said that decision was premature since Hasan could still file a habeas petition, or a challenge to the legality of one’s detainment.
Welch urged the country to still reckon with the ethics of a death sentence, even if it will no longer be broadcast.
“Capital punishment does not restore at all the lives that were taken by this gunman or by any gunman or murderer,” Welch said. “It instead robs us of the public reckoning with why we live in such a violent society, why we have mass shootings, and what needs to change in our society and our government.”