KILLEEN, Tex. — A military jury on Friday found Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan guilty of carrying out the largest mass murder at a military installation in American history.
The verdict, delivered by 13 senior Army officers, came 17 days after Major Hasan’s court-martial began on Aug. 6, and nearly four years after the day that Major Hasan killed and wounded dozens of unarmed soldiers at a medical deployment center at Fort Hood here.
He and prosecutors said his mission was to kill as many soldiers as he could as part of a jihad to protect “my Muslim brothers” from American soldiers deploying to Afghanistan. A year after the shooting, he told a military mental health panel that he wished he had died in the attack so he could have become a martyr. He expressed no remorse for his actions, only regret that he was paralyzed by police officers who shot him in ending the attack.
The verdict now opens the sentencing phase of the court-martial, with the 13 officers deciding whether to sentence Major Hasan to die by lethal injection. He could become the first American soldier in 52 years to be executed in the military’s death chamber at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. One of the reasons capital punishment in the military has been so rare is that execution of a soldier requires presidential approval.
Source: The New York Times, August 23, 2013
