Benjamin Cole: Death Row Inmate Who Killed His 9-Month-Old Daughter |True Crime Documentary 

Benjamin Cole: Death Row Inmate Who Killed His 9-Month-Old Daughter |True Crime Documentary 

Breanna cried and interrupted his video game and he killed her. She died a horrific death and he gets off easy and gets to get a little injection in his arm and go to sleep. >> On October 20th, 2022, Benjamin Cole was executed by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.

 He was pronounced dead at 10:22 in the morning. 20 years earlier, he had ended the life of a 9-month-old girl, his own daughter. Her name was Breanna. This is the story of what happened between those two mornings, December 20th, 2002. Claremore, Oklahoma, a small house, a crib, a baby girl 9 months old crying the way babies do.

 Her father, Benjamin Cole, was in another room. He was playing a video game. The crying continued. Cole went to the crib. What happened next took seconds. He grabbed Breanna and forced her body backward, bending her over the crib rail. Her spine snapped. Her aorta tore. Then, according to prosecutors, Cole walked away. He went back to the game.

 Breanna Victoria Cole bled internally [music] until she died. There was no long investigation, no manhunt, no mystery to solve. When police arrived, Cole gave a taped confession. He admitted what he had done. He told them he would regret it for the rest of his life. That should have been the simplest part of this case. It was not. Cole was arrested within days of Breanna’s death.

 By December 26th, 2002, he was formally charged in Rogers County with first-degree murder of a child. Prosecutors moved to seek the death penalty. They filed what’s called a bill of particulars, a legal document listing the reasons they believed this crime deserved execution. Three reasons were listed. A prior felony conviction involving violence, the especially cruel nature of the killing, and the belief that Cole would remain a danger if allowed to live.

 The state offered him a way out, a plea deal. Plead guilty, and the sentence would be life without parole. No trial. No death penalty. No 20 years of appeals. Cole said no. His attorneys would later say he believed going to trial was, in his words, God’s will. He told them his case would transform Rogers County.

 That it would let God touch hearts. That somehow he would walk away a free man. He rejected the deal more than once. Before the case could even go to a jury, the court had to answer a different question. Was Benjamin Cole mentally competent to stand trial at all? Judges ordered competency evaluations in both 2003 and 2004.

 Under Oklahoma’s process for these determinations, a jury reviewed the question and found him competent to be tried. The trial itself began in the fall of 2004. Prosecutors laid out the facts plainly. The crying, the interruption, the injuries 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 him of first-degree murder. In the sentencing phase, the same jury weighed the aggravating factors. They found two of the three the state had argued. That Cole had a prior felony conviction involving violence and that the murder was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel.

 On December 8th, 2004, the trial court sentenced Benjamin Cole to death. He was 39 years old. Breanna had been dead for almost exactly 2 years. 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. It became relevant later in a different fight over whether Cole should be executed at all. 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. Post-conviction appeals followed in 2008 and again years later.

 Each one extended his time on death row. Then in 2015, with the standard appeals exhausted and an execution date approaching, everything stopped. Not because of Cole’s case specifically, because of Oklahoma’s execution system itself. The state’s attorney general at the time asked for a stay saying he no longer had confidence 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 6 years. During that pause, Cole’s attorneys pursued something specific, a request that the case be sent for a separate jury trial, just to determine 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 would be litigated for years. It 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. >> [music] >> And this is where the case became genuinely contested. His attorneys argued Cole had deteriorated for years inside Oklahoma State Penitentiary. They described a man diagnosed with schizophrenia, compounded by a brain lesion that had grown over time.

 They said he lived in a largely catatonic state, that he refused medical care, that he ignored his own hygiene, that he hoarded food in his cell and rarely spoke, even to his own lawyers. At a 2016 clemency hearing, testimony described him 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.

 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. He spent the hearing slumped over at the waist. But the state 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. The state’s Pardon and Parole Board voted four to one to deny clemency. Cole’s attorneys took the fight to the US Supreme Court. Two separate appeals were filed in his final days.

 One on the Wednesday before his execution. Another on the morning of. Both were denied. October 20th, 2022. Oklahoma State Penitentiary, McAlester. Cole did not request a last meal. He 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.

 Journalists from the Associated Press, The Oklahoman, a local newspaper, and two television stations. At 10:06 in the morning, the first of three lethal drugs began to flow. Cole was declared unconscious six minutes later. Witnesses said he could be heard snoring inside the chamber. 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. He 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. She said Cole should have been executed long before. She said there was a little girl the family never got to know, never got to see grow up. Oklahoma’s attorney general at the time released a statement saying justice had been served for Brianna 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. One is the man a jury convicted in 2004, competent, deliberate, 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, barely able to speak.

 Both versions were presented under oath. Only one man was executed. When 20 years separate a crime from its punishment and a person’s mind may have changed entirely in that time, who exactly is the state executing? The man who committed the crime or the man he became in the years after?