The last public hanging in America

On August fourteenth, nineteen thirty-six in Owensboro, Kentucky, an estimated twenty thousand people gathered for the public hanging of Rainey Bethea, a man in his twenties convicted of raping and killing Lischia Edwards, seventy.

A carnival of spectacle

Teenagers sold popcorn and soda to spectators. Some slept overnight near the gallows to keep their spots. The execution happened at five am after what locals called necktie parties the evening before.

The last high-profile public execution

Bethea's death embarrassed Kentucky. The governor outlawed public executions eighteen months later. Another hanging in Missouri in nineteen thirty-seven was lesser known and marked America's final public execution until now.

The Pentagon announces a livestream

More than ninety years later, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the military would publicly execute Nidal Hasan, who killed thirteen unarmed fellow soldiers in two thousand nine at Fort Hood military base in…

Hegseth's justification

Pete Hegseth said people need to understand there are serious consequences for these types of things. He did not elaborate on why livestreaming specifically was necessary to communicate that message.

“People need to understand that there's serious consequences for these types of things.”

Death penalty support is declining

University of Colorado professor emeritus Michael Radelet, a long-time scholar of capital punishment, said he never imagined another public execution.

“I never imagined [another] public execution.”

The horror of entertainment

Sonya Lea, who published a book about Bethea's execution, said livestreaming makes the spectacle wider than the twenty thousand who gathered in Owensboro.

“What they called it in 1936 was a carnival of sadism.”

Comparison to authoritarian regimes

Lea said she believed America had moved past this level of grotesquery, which only a few countries engage in: Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan.

“I really thought, with all my heart, that we had put this in the rearview mirror.”

Religious and research opposition

The chair of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops labeled the livestream execution announcement as barbaric.

“A public execution is not who we are.”

Trump approves, Vance declines

Vice-President JD Vance, a Catholic, said he would not watch the execution. President Donald Trump dodged whether he would tune in but confirmed he approved the decision to livestream Hasan's death, saying the death penalty…

“I really don't care how he goes as long as he goes.”