Despite his attorneys’ assertions that he was profoundly mentally ill, Oklahoma executed convict Benjamin Cole on Thursday morning. Cole died at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester at 10:22 a.m. He was the sixth convict in Oklahoma since the state began executions in October 2021. Cole performed a two-minute, often incoherent prayer while strapped on the gurney. “Choose Jesus while you can,” he said. At 10:06 a.m., the first of three deadly execution chemicals was administered, and Cole was declared unconscious at 10:12. Inside the death chamber, he could be heard snoozing.
Cole was basically ‘catatonic,’ according to his counsel:
The facts of Cole’s case compelled the state to spare his life, his advocates told parole board members in recent months, though the arguments failed. They cited “changing decency standards.” Oklahoma had “the opportunity to demonstrate fortitude, to adhere to these norms, of history by forbidding the execution of Benjamin Cole, a profoundly mentally ill and physically infirm individual.”
Brianna Cole’s murder:
Cole was found guilty of Brianna’s callous December 2002 murder when her cries stopped him as he was playing a computer game, according to the attorney general’s office. Cole seized his daughter’s ankles on her stomach and forced them up to her head, fracturing her spine and causing her to bleed to death, according to a probable cause affidavit. According to O’Connor, Cole returned to his video game after his daughter died. According to his clemency plea, Cole admitted to causing his daughter’s fatal injuries in a taped confession, telling investigators he would “regret his acts for the rest of his life.”
Image Credit by Wichita, KS
According to the petition, the mental degeneration began decades ago:
According to his petition, Cole’s mental health difficulties can be traced back to his childhood, when he grew up in a junkyard surrounded by “rampant” drug and alcohol misuse. Cole began drinking as a young child, encouraged by the adults in his life, and one of Cole’s brothers said they would get high huffing gasoline by the time Cole was ten years old. According to the petition, Cole was also subjected to years of verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. Cole graduated from high school but began exhibiting “all of the signs of a person beginning to struggle with serious mental illness” around that time, according to the clemency petition, noting that 18 is the typical age when early-adult onset severe mental illnesses like schizophrenia first emerge.
Attorneys contended that the inmate’s condition justified mercy:
Cole’s condition deteriorated in the years following his trial, during which teams of post-conviction counsel battled to connect with him as a small parade of doctors and psychiatrists assessed his worsening mental state, according to the petition. Cole was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2008 after his mental health had deteriorated due to his lack of treatment for nearly 20 years. The doctor reportedly stated that Cole was “convinced” that discussing his situation “would weaken his trust in Jesus and jeopardize his current saved status,” according to the petition. These beliefs highlight what his lawyers call an “implacable reluctance” that hampers their capacity to collaborate with him on his case.
His clemency petition describes how attorneys and physicians found Cole unclean and “unkempt” within his cell, which he practically never left. According to the petition, corrections officers and his case manager told Cole’s attorneys that he kept the lights off almost all the time and showed no respect for his cleanliness. Cole mailed some of his hair and a tooth to his mother in 2015. In 2019, he handed one of his attorneys a packet containing two more of his teeth and a note the attorneys interpreted as a request to mail the teeth to his mother – both instances, according to his clemency petition, exemplify his sharp decline. In addition, according to his petition, a physician analyzed an MRI of Cole.
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