Oklahoma executes mentally ill man who killed his 9-month-old-daughter

Oklahoma executed Benjamin Cole, the 57-year-old who was sentenced to death for the 2002 killing of his nine-month-old daughter Brianna, on Thursday.

A spokesperson for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections confirmed to reporters that the sentence had been carried out and that the “time of death was 10:22 a.m. (CT),” per CNN.

Cole killed the child by “forcibly bending the infant backward, breaking her spine and tearing her aorta,” according to the Associated Press.

Last month, Oklahoma’s pardon and parole board voted against recommending clemency for Cole and voted 4-to1 against the reprieve petition.

Donna Daniel, Brianna’s aunt, told the board: “The first time I got to see Brianna in person was lying in a casket. Do you know how horrible it is to see a nine-month-old baby in a casket?”

Attorneys representing Cole have argued that he is severely mentally ill and has been diagnosed with both paranoid schizophrenia and a growing lesion on his brain. They attempted to argue to the parole board that, due to these reasons, he was unfit for execution.

Attorney General John O’Connor released a statement in the wake of the board’s decision, saying he was “grateful that the Board denied Cole’s request for executive clemency,” according to Oklahoma local news.

“Our thoughts and prayers are with the other members of Brianna’s family. Brianna Victoria Cole was just nine months old when she was brutally murdered at the hands of her own father, Benjamin Cole, Sr., on December 20, 2002, when her cries interrupted Cole’s video game,” Mr O’Connor said, before getting into the horrific and brutal way in which Cole murdered Brianna.

Mr O’Connor also challenged the claims made by Cole’s attorneys: “His attorneys claim Cole is mentally ill to the point of catatonia, the fact is that Cole fully cooperated with a mental evaluation in July of this year. The evaluator, who was not hired by Cole or the State, found Cole to be competent to be executed and that ‘Mr. Cole does not currently evidence any substantial, overt signs of mental illness, intellectual impairment, and/or neurocognitive impairment.’”