Benjamin Cole was pronounced dead at 10:22 a. m. on October 20, 2022, at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, ending a 20-year legal odyssey that began with the brutal killing of his own 9-month-old daughter, Breanna Victoria Cole.
The execution was carried out by lethal injection after a final round of appeals, including two urgent petitions to the United States Supreme Court, were denied. Witnesses reported that Cole was unconscious within six minutes of the first drug being administered and could be heard snoring inside the chamber.
The crime that sent Cole to death row took place on December 20, 2002, in a small house in Claremore, Oklahoma. Breanna was crying in her crib, the way babies do, while her father sat in another room playing a video game. The crying continued, and Cole went to the crib.
What happened next took only seconds. He grabbed Breanna and forced her body backward over the crib rail, snapping her spine and tearing her aorta. Prosecutors said Cole then walked away and returned to his game while the infant bled internally and died.
There was no long investigation, no manhunt, and no mystery to solve in this case. When police arrived, Cole gave a taped confession in which he admitted exactly what he had done and told investigators he would regret it for the rest of his life. He was arrested within days and formally charged on December 26, 2002, with first-degree murder of a child in Rogers County.
Prosecutors moved quickly to seek the death penalty, filing a bill of particulars that listed three aggravating factors.
Those factors were a prior felony conviction involving violence, the especially cruel nature of the killing, and the belief that Cole would remain a danger to society if allowed to live. The state offered him a way out, a plea deal that would have resulted in life without parole, no trial, no death penalty, and no two decades of appeals. Cole rejected the offer, and he rejected it more than once.
His attorneys later said he believed going to trial was God’s will and that his case would transform Rogers County and touch hearts.
Before the case could reach a jury, the court had to determine whether Benjamin Cole was mentally competent to stand trial. Judges ordered competency evaluations in both 2003 and 2004, and a jury ultimately found him competent. The trial began in the fall of 2004, with prosecutors laying out the facts plainly: the crying, the interruption, and injuries that a medical examiner said could not have happened by accident.
The defense did not dispute that Cole caused his daughter’s death. There was no argument about who did it.
The jury convicted Cole of first-degree murder and then weighed the aggravating factors during the sentencing phase. They found two of the three factors the state had argued: a prior felony conviction involving violence and that the murder was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel. On December 8, 2004, Cole was sentenced to death
He was 39 years old at the time. Breanna had been dead for almost exactly two years, and her family would spend the next two decades fighting for the sentence to be carried out.
Court filings would later describe Cole’s upbringing as marked by addiction and abuse across multiple generations of his family. His attorneys pointed to a documented history of mental illness in his background long before Breanna’s death. None of this was disputed at trial as it related to who committed the crime, but it became highly relevant later in a separate fight over whether Cole should be executed at all.
That fight would consume more than six years and reach the highest court in the land.
A death sentence in Oklahoma rarely means a quick execution, and Cole’s case became one of the state’s longest. His direct appeal was denied in 2007, and post-conviction appeals followed in 2008 and again years later, each one extending his time on death row. Then, in 2015, with standard appeals exhausted and an execution date approaching, everything stopped, not because of Cole’s case specifically, but because of Oklahoma’s execution system itself.
The state’s attorney general at the time requested a stay, saying he no longer had confidence that the Department of Corrections could legally carry out an execution. This came during a period when Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol was under intense scrutiny following documented errors in the execution chamber involving the wrong drugs being used. Oklahoma would not execute another inmate for more than six years, and Cole’s legal team used that pause to pursue a specific request.
Cole’s attorneys asked that the case be sent for a separate jury trial to determine only whether he was mentally competent to be executed, a different legal question from competency to stand trial. Oklahoma law allows for this when there is, in the legal language, good reason to believe an inmate may not understand what is happening to them. That request was litigated for years and was ultimately denied, not because a jury ruled against Cole on the merits, but on procedural grounds.
The courts never fully answered the question his attorneys were asking. As Oklahoma resumed executions in October 2021, Cole’s case moved back toward the death chamber, and the final chapter became genuinely contested. His attorneys argued that Cole had deteriorated for years inside the penitentiary.
They described a man diagnosed with schizophrenia, compounded by a brain lesion that had grown over time, living in a largely catatonic state, refusing medical care, ignoring his own hygiene, and hoarding food in his cell.
At a 2016 clemency hearing, testimony described Cole as someone who sometimes crawled on the floor of his cell. Two board members voted to recommend clemency that year, citing unresolved questions about his brain scans, but the board as a whole voted against it, three to two. By 2022, at his final competency hearing, Cole appeared in court in a wheelchair.
He did not speak and spent the hearing slumped over at the waist, a stark image that his attorneys said showed a man who no longer understood his own fate.
The state, however, told a different story. A forensic psychologist who evaluated Cole that year reported he did not show substantial signs of hallucinations, mental illness, or intellectual impairment. Staff at the penitentiary, including the warden, reportedly held views that stood in sharp contrast to what the defense described.
A Pittsburgh County judge ruled Cole competent to be executed, and the state’s Pardon and Parole Board voted four to one to deny clemency.
Cole’s attorneys took the fight to the United States Supreme Court, filing two separate appeals in his final days. One came on the Wednesday before his execution, and another was filed on the morning of the execution itself. Both were denied.
On October 20, 2022, Cole did not request a last meal and was given the facility’s standard religious meal: vegetarian lasagna, a salad, a tortilla, and a fruit drink packet. Five media witnesses were selected to observe the execution.
The witnesses included journalists from the Associated Press, The Oklahoman, a local newspaper, and two television stations. At 10:06 a. m.
, the first of three lethal drugs began to flow into Cole’s veins. He was declared unconscious six minutes later. Strapped to the gurney, Cole delivered his final words, a rambling prayer that lasted close to two minutes.
He asked for Jesus to receive his spirit and told those listening to choose Jesus while they still could.
He said, Keep your eyes peeled. Be ready at all times. And near the end, he said, I forgive everyone that I have done wrong.
At 10:22 a. m. , Benjamin Cole was pronounced dead.
He was 57 years old. Breanna’s aunt and uncle, Donna Daniel and Dr. Brian Young, spoke afterward.
Daniel said a 9-month-old baby should not have had to wait 20 years for justice, that Cole should have been executed long before, and that there was a little girl the family never got to know or see grow up
Oklahoma’s attorney general at the time released a statement saying justice had been served for Breanna and for the people of Oklahoma while acknowledging that nothing could fill the void left by her death. Cole’s attorney, in his own statement, said his client had suffered from a serious mental illness that went untreated for years. Two versions of Benjamin Cole exist in the public record, and both were presented under oath to courts and juries.
One is the man a jury convicted in 2004, competent, deliberate, and aware enough to reject a plea deal because he believed his trial was God’s will. The other is the man described nearly two decades later, wheelchair-bound, catatonic, crawling on a cell floor, and barely able to speak. Only one man was executed, and the question that lingers is whether the state executed the man who committed the crime or the man he became in the years after.
