McALESTER, Okla. — The State of Oklahoma executed Benjamin Robert Cole on the morning of October 20, 2022, ending a legal battle that had stretched across two decades and forced the courts to confront one of the most wrenching questions in American capital punishment: whether a severely mentally ill man could be put to death for killing his own infant daughter.
Cole, 57, was pronounced dead at 10:22 a. m. inside the execution chamber at Oklahoma State Penitentiary after a three-𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 lethal injection began flowing at 10:06 a.
m. He became the 2,001st person executed in Oklahoma history, according to the state’s tally, and the sixth inmate put to death in a rapid series of executions that year.
His final words, delivered in a rambling, at times incoherent prayer that lasted roughly two minutes, urged the witnesses in the room to “choose Jesus while you still can.” He was declared unconscious at approximately 10:11 a. m.
, and those present reported hearing him snoring inside the chamber before he was pronounced dead eleven minutes later.
The execution closed a case that began on an ordinary December afternoon in 2002 inside a Rogers County home, when a 9-month-old girl named Briana Victoria Cole began to cry while her father was playing a video game. What happened next, according to Cole’s own confession and the medical examiner’s findings, was an act of catastrophic violence that fractured the infant’s spine and tore her aorta.
Cole was convicted of first-degree murder in 2004 and sentenced to death after a jury found two aggravating circumstances: that he had a prior felony conviction involving violence, and that Briana’s murder was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel. The prior conviction stemmed from the 1987 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 of his first son, an infant, in California.
But the crime was never the only question before the courts. For nearly twenty years, the case of Benjamin Cole became a prolonged examination of a mind that many who dealt with him believed was coming apart, and of a legal system that repeatedly concluded he nonetheless understood why he was being punished.
His attorneys argued that Cole suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, religious delusions, and neurological damage so severe that by 2022 he was a frail, largely wheelchair-bound man who no longer rationally understood the sentence awaiting him. The state countered that Cole had cooperated with a court-appointed psychologist months earlier and had demonstrated precise, accurate knowledge of his conviction, his exhausted appeals, and his scheduled execution date.
That dispute — between mental illness and legal competency — sat at the heart of the final battle over his life, and it is a distinction the courts answered again and again in narrow terms. No doctor and no jury ever declared Cole insane. The question they resolved was whether he was competent to be executed, and their answer, at every level, was yes.
Cole’s childhood, documented years later by defense investigators who interviewed relatives and combed through school and medical records, offered no tidy explanation for what he became. He was held back in kindergarten and again in fifth grade. He was placed in special education for difficulties with reading and auditory comprehension.
By sixth grade, testing showed an unusually wide gap between his verbal and non-verbal intelligence scores.
Relatives described a chaotic and at times abusive household. Family members recounted physical and emotional 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮, and a stepsister described an environment where boundary violations, including incest among relatives, were disturbingly common. His father struggled with substance 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮, and the extended family carried a documented history of serious mental illness, including two paternal cousins later diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Mitigation evidence also cited his mother’s reported alcohol and benzadrine use during pregnancy, and a stepbrother’s account that Cole inhaled gasoline fumes for a year or two as a child, sometimes daily. None of it amounted to a diagnosis in real time. There was no psychiatrist tracking him, no clinical flag raised on a school file.
By his late teens, Cole was drinking heavily. He joined the United States Air Force hoping for structure, but military records and family accounts describe a young man who had difficulty adjusting, who resisted routine promotion, and whose behavior struck those around him as increasingly strange. His mother and brother later said, in blunt, non-clinical language, that he had “snapped.”
One claim that surfaced only later, cited by defense experts as an early marker of psychosis, was that Cole believed the heavy metal band Slayer was sending him subliminal messages compelling him toward actions he said he did not want to take. It placed delusion-adjacent thinking years before Briana’s murder and years before any formal psychiatric diagnosis.
Years before Briana, Cole married Sandra Tussy, and together they had a son. The marriage was troubled almost from the beginning. Military records document altercations between the couple in late 1986.
Then in January 1987, while Cole was caring for his six-month-old son alone, the baby was injured. When Sandra returned home and found the child hurt, she took him to the hospital over Cole’s objections.
That single decision — a young mother overriding her husband to protect their baby — created the paper trail that prosecutors would later use against him. Cole was convicted of the willful and unlawful infliction of cruel and inhuman corporal punishment on his own son, and in April 1987 he began serving a two-year sentence in the California Department of Corrections. His marriage ended while he was incarcerated.
He was paroled in February 1988, and later that same year he was discharged from the Air Force under other than honorable conditions. In roughly eighteen months, his marriage, his military career, and any claim to a stable adult life had collapsed, and he now carried a criminal conviction for abusing an infant.
After his release, Cole made halting attempts to rebuild. He took classes at Bakersfield College and worked for a time as a welder. Neither lasted.
His employment history from that period forward was marked by short stints and long gaps. In 1989, he was arrested for public drunkenness — a small entry in the record, but a consistent one.
Around 1990, Cole became involved with Candy Lewis, who became his second wife. Together they had two children. Later accounts gathered for his mitigation case described a relationship shaped by instability, reports of significant mood swings, nights when Cole stayed awake compulsively cleaning the house, and the same undercurrent of heavy drinking that had run through his first marriage.
It was also around this period that Cole began drifting toward fundamentalist Christian circles, an interest that over the following decades would come to dominate nearly everything about how he presented himself to the world. Three relationships, five children across them, and in each case the same undertow of heavy drinking, financial instability, and reports of volatility inside the home.
Then he met Susan Young, who became his common-law wife. Their relationship produced Briana Victoria Cole, born March 27, 2002 — Cole’s third child, born into a life still defined by unemployment, drinking, and an increasingly precarious grip on stability. In the months leading up to Briana’s death, that fragile stability kept eroding further.
Cole struggled to hold any job. He and Susan reportedly lost custody of an older child of hers from a previous relationship following contact with child welfare authorities. There were periods of homelessness for the family.
His religious preoccupations deepened during the same stretch, including what his attorneys later called the “Bakersfield Prophecy,” a religious experience Cole said he underwent years earlier during his incarceration in California.
By December 2002, none of the arguments about mental illness had been formally made. There was no diagnosis on record, no expert testimony, no brain scan. There was simply a father, a mother, and a 9-month-old girl living together in a home in Rogers County, Oklahoma.
And then, on an ordinary afternoon, Briana began to cry.
According to Cole’s eventual statement to police, he went to her. She was lying on her stomach. He tried to make her stop crying.
He grabbed her by the ankles and pushed her legs up toward her head, bending her small body backward. The force fractured her spine. It tore her aorta.
Cole went back to his video game.
He did not tell Susan what had happened. He did not call for help. Sometime later, Susan noticed that something was badly wrong with her daughter.
Briana’s condition was deteriorating, her skin turning blue, foam appearing at her mouth. Emergency services were called. Cole performed CPR while Susan called 911.
Paramedics arrived and tried to save the infant, but the injuries were catastrophic. Briana died that day. The first account Cole gave investigators did not explain what had actually happened to his daughter.
The autopsy did. The medical examiner found a spine snapped in half and an aorta completely torn through — injuries the state later argued could not possibly have been accidental.
When investigators confronted Cole with those findings, he eventually admitted what he had done, describing largely the same sequence of events he would go on to describe in court: the crying, the ankles, the legs pushed toward her head. One detail from that confession would follow the case for the next two decades. After admitting he had killed his daughter, Cole asked investigators how many years he was facing.
Prosecutors would later point to that question as evidence that whatever else was happening inside his mind, he understood immediately that what he had done carried serious legal consequences. Six days later, on December 26, 2002, prosecutors formally charged Benjamin Cole with first-degree murder of a child.
The prosecution’s case was, in its essentials, simple. Briana was alive. Cole applied catastrophic force to her body.
She died. He eventually confessed to causing her injuries. But the state had more than the crime itself to work with.
It had Cole’s prior conviction for abusing his first son, which prosecutors used to argue that Brianna’s death was not an isolated act of violence but the continuation of an established pattern.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals later concluded that Briana likely remained briefly conscious after the spinal injury before she died, and that the extraordinary force involved was sufficient to support the “heinous, atrocious, or cruel” aggravator, even though her death came relatively quickly afterward.
But even as the state built its case around the crime, Cole’s own defense attorneys were noticing something they had not expected. Their client was becoming steadily harder to reach. By the summer of 2003, they told the court that their repeated attempts to discuss the case with him had progressively deteriorated to the point that they were not confident he could meaningfully assist in his own defense.
The trial court halted proceedings and ordered a mental health evaluation. In August 2003, following an evaluation by Dr. Samina Christopher, Cole’s attorneys stipulated that he was competent to stand trial, but the underlying concern never fully went away.
In July 2004, his attorneys filed again, and this time the question was serious enough to warrant a full competency trial before a separate jury.
No doctor and no jury ever declared Cole simply insane. His attorneys argued that his extreme religious fervor prevented him from rationally assisting his own defense. The competency trial lasted two days.
At the end of it, the jury found Benjamin Cole competent to stand trial. The murder trial proceeded from there.
In October 2004, a jury convicted him of first-degree child 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 murder, found the two aggravating circumstances the state had argued for, and recommended a sentence of death. In the guilt phase, jurors heard a case built almost entirely around physical evidence and Cole’s own confession. In the penalty phase, they heard about his prior conviction, the brutality of Briana’s injuries, and arguments from the defense about his troubled history.
The death sentence did not end the questions swirling around Cole’s mental state. In many ways, it was only the beginning of them. The years on death row transformed him, according to nearly everyone who dealt with him during that period.
Religion became the center of his existence — constant talk of scripture, of Jesus, of prophecy and the end of the world.
He grew increasingly isolated and, according to his attorneys, increasingly difficult to reach at all. One of his federal lawyers, Kenneth Lee, later described years spent trying to hold substantive meetings with Cole that shrank over time into minutes, sometimes nothing at all. According to Lee’s account, Cole would sometimes refuse to sit down for a meeting.
At other times, he would say almost nothing throughout.
Lee described him as emaciated, disheveled, and largely unable or unwilling to speak. His letters changed, too. Early, coherent correspondence gradually gave way to fragmented notes that made it difficult for his own legal team to have any real conversation with him about his case, his history, or the sentence hanging over him.
To his attorneys, all of this looked like deterioration. But the legal question was never simply whether Cole behaved strangely. Almost no one involved in the case, including the state, seriously disputed that he did.
The actual legal question was narrower and far harder to answer: Did he understand why he was being punished? Could he rationally connect what he had done to the sentence that awaited him?
In 2008, psychiatrist Dr. Raphael Morris evaluated Cole and concluded that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia with grandiose delusions, describing his intense religiosity as a manifestation of that illness rather than simple eccentricity or devotion. The diagnosis reframed years of behavior his attorneys had been quietly documenting — the withdrawal, the fragmented letters, the religious fixation — as something clinical rather than merely strange.
From there, the defense began working backward through his entire life, building an argument that the disease had likely been developing since his early twenties, long before any doctor ever put a name to it. That argument had a built-in vulnerability. Cole’s history of alcoholism, his history of violence, and his prior conviction for child 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 were not on their own symptoms of schizophrenia.
Untangling how much of his life reflected a genuine escalating mental illness and how much reflected other, harder truths about who he was became the unresolved argument that would define the rest of the case. It is also worth noting what did not happen during this period. Cole was not moved to a psychiatric facility.
He was not taken off death row for treatment.
The 2008 diagnosis existed from that point forward as a documented medical fact sitting inside a legal system that had already determined years earlier that he was competent to stand trial and had earned a death sentence. Those two tracks — the medical record and the legal record — would run in parallel for the rest of his life.
In 2022, Cole’s attorneys introduced a new kind of evidence into that argument: neuroimaging. Neuroradiologist Dr. Travis Snyder reviewed an MRI of Cole’s brain taken that March and identified a lesion in the left frontal white matter, along with other abnormalities he believed were connected to Cole’s ongoing psychiatric deterioration.
His attorneys argued that the lesion had grown in recent years.
Snyder had never personally examined Cole. His conclusions were drawn entirely from the imaging itself. Alongside his findings, psychologist George Huff submitted his own report describing a severely mentally ill, profoundly decompensated man based on years of attempted contact with Cole in his cell.
Together, the two reports painted a picture of overlapping neurological and psychiatric collapse.
But a brain lesion on its own does not prove what it caused. The defense’s argument connected the abnormality to Cole’s symptoms. It did not establish that connection as settled scientific fact, and other experts disagreed about how much weight a retrospective imaging finding like this one could actually bear.
That distinction — that mental illness, brain injury, psychosis, and legal competency are four separate questions rather than one single question — sat at the heart of the final legal battle over Cole’s life. A brain scan makes for a powerful visual, a dark spot on gray matter presented as the physical evidence of a broken mind. But the honest version of this story has to hold two things at once.
The lesion was real and documented by a credentialed expert, and its connection to everything else in Cole’s case remained a matter of interpretation and dispute, not proven fact, right up until the day he died. In July 2022, Cole was transported to the Oklahoma Forensic Center and evaluated by Dr. Scott Orth, a neutral forensic psychologist with no ties to either the defense or the prosecution.
Unlike Snyder, Orth spoke with Cole directly and at length, and what he found complicated the defense’s case considerably. According to the court record, Cole spontaneously explained to Orth that the evaluation was meant to determine whether he understood that he had killed his daughter and been sentenced to death for it. He knew a jury had convicted him.
He knew he had exhausted his appeals. He knew the date set for his execution, October 20, 2022.
Orth concluded that Cole did not currently show substantial overt signs of mental illness, intellectual impairment, or neurocognitive impairment that would prevent him from rationally understanding his own execution, and that his continued religious statements, however persistent, did not override that understanding.
Cole’s attorneys pushed back hard against that conclusion, pointing to years of documented evidence that their client had withdrawn almost entirely from contact. Dr. Huff had been attempting to evaluate Cole since 2016.
By April 2022, he could no longer even get Cole to leave his cell and was reduced to observing him through an opening in the cell door. Huff still concluded, based on that limited access, that Cole was mentally ill and incompetent to be executed.
The state’s counterargument was pointed and, in its own way, difficult to dismiss. If Cole refused to engage with an evaluator at all, how reliable could that evaluator’s conclusions about his inner state really be? Orth, by contrast, had gotten Cole to talk, and Cole had demonstrated precisely the kind of factual understanding the legal standard required.
It is entirely possible for both Huff and Orth to have been acting in good faith and still reach opposite conclusions, because they were in a real sense measuring different things. Huff was measuring years of accumulated withdrawal and interpreting the refusal to engage as itself a symptom. Orth was measuring a single window of direct contact and interpreting Cole’s ability to produce specific, accurate facts about his case as decisive.
In September 2022, a hearing was held in Pittsburg County District Court on Cole’s request for a full competency proceeding. On October 4, Judge Michael Hogan denied that request, finding that Cole’s attorneys had not met the threshold showing required to justify one. Cole appealed immediately.
On October 17, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals denied his petition and his request for a stay, pointing directly to Orth’s evaluation as evidence that Cole understood what he had done, what he had been convicted of, and what was about to happen to him. From there, the fight moved to federal court and finally to the United States Supreme Court, which denied a final stay on October 19. There was nowhere else left to go.
By the time all of this played out, Cole was 57 years old, and the two portraits of him in front of the state could not have been more different. His attorneys described a frail, largely wheelchair-bound man suffering from severe schizophrenia, brain damage, catatonic-like symptoms, and near-total withdrawal from the people around him.
They asked Oklahoma’s Pardon and Parole Board to commute his sentence to life without parole, arguing that he posed no danger to anyone and was no longer the same man who had committed the crime two decades earlier. The board was not persuaded. In September 2022, it voted 4-1 to deny clemency.
Briana’s relatives spoke at that hearing. Her aunt, Donna Daniel, asked the board directly not to deny the family justice. Prosecutors described Briana as a “precious cutie pie” who never learned to walk or read and who never lived long enough to see a first Christmas or birthday.
Prosecutors emphasized the same points they had made at trial: the brutality of the killing and Cole’s prior conviction for abusing his own son.
The Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office framed the clemency fight in stark terms, arguing publicly that although Cole’s attorneys claimed he was mentally ill to the point of catatonia, he had fully cooperated with Orth’s evaluation months earlier — cooperation the state read as itself a sign that the deterioration his lawyers described had been overstated. That framing, more than any single piece of evidence, appeared to carry the day with the board.
A district judge’s denial of a competency trial, a federal court’s refusal to intervene, and the Supreme Court’s rejection of a final stay all followed within roughly two weeks of one another. By October 19, 2022, every legal avenue Cole’s attorneys had available to them had been exhausted.
On the morning of October 20, 2022, Benjamin Cole was brought into the execution chamber at Oklahoma State Penitentiary and strapped to the gurney. He had declined a ceremonial last meal and chosen not to have a spiritual adviser present with him. At 10:06 a.
m. , the first of three lethal drugs began to flow.
Cole spoke for roughly two minutes, a rambling, at times incoherent prayer urging the witnesses in the room to choose Jesus while they still could. He was declared unconscious around 10:11 or 10:12 a. m.
Those present could hear him snoring inside the chamber. At 10:22 a. m.
, he was pronounced dead.
Two of Briana’s relatives, her maternal aunt Donna Daniel and her uncle Brian Young, witnessed the execution. Asked afterward what they would do next, Young said simply, “Go back to normal, as normal as it can be.” Daniel added that the family should not have had to wait 20 years for a 9-month-old baby to get justice.
Cole’s attorney, Tom Herd, released a statement afterward describing his client as a person with serious mental illness whose schizophrenia and brain damage had led him to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 his daughter, and calling it unconscionable that the state had denied him a competency trial.
The Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, in its own public statement, thanked the pardon and parole board for denying clemency and offered condolences to Briana’s family. Two statements released within hours of each other described the same morning in almost entirely incompatible terms.
To Cole’s attorneys, the state had just executed a severely mentally ill, traumatized man who no longer had a rational understanding of why his life was being taken. To Briana’s family, the state had finally answered, after two decades, for the death of a 9-month-old girl.
The court record is not ambiguous about what Benjamin Cole did. He killed his daughter. He had previously been convicted of abusing his infant son.
A jury convicted him of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death, and that sentence was ultimately carried out. Those facts are not in dispute.
What is far less settled is everything underneath those facts: a childhood marked by 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮, neglect, and a family history thick with serious mental illness; early adult behavior that in hindsight looked to some experts like the first signs of psychosis; a schizophrenia diagnosis that arrived years after the murder rather than before it; and a brain lesion whose significance different experts read in entirely opposite directions.
The courts never accepted an argument that reduced Briana’s death to mental illness alone, and they never concluded that Cole had no mental illness at all. The actual question the courts answered again and again was much narrower: Was he legally competent to be executed in 2022? Their answer was yes.
That distinction matters because mental illness and legal competency are not the same question, and collapsing the two into one turns a genuinely difficult case into a simple one it was never meant to be. It is the distinction most true-crime storytelling tends to erase in the name of a cleaner narrative — either flattening Cole into pure monster or flattening him into pure patient, when the actual record insists on holding both readings at once.
None of this is an argument for a particular verdict on how the state should have handled his final years. It is an argument for sitting with the discomfort the case actually produces rather than resolving it artificially in either direction.
Briana Victoria Cole was 9 months old when she died. She never learned to walk. She never had a first birthday.
Almost everything known about her today comes from records made after her death — medical reports, courtroom testimony, and the words of relatives who spent 20 years asking the state not to forget her.
The man who killed her spent those same 20 years surrounded by appeals, experts, and hearings. Years of chances to be heard, examined, and argued over. Briana never had any of that.
On October 20, 2022, 20 years after her death, the state of Oklahoma executed her father. He was 57 years old. His last words were about Jesus.
Hers were never recorded at all, because she never had the chance to speak.