Oklahoma continues execution spree with inmate who attorneys argued was insane and ‘essentially nonfunctional’

Oklahoma State Dept. of Corrections; Insider Oklahoma executed Benjamin Cole on Thursday. Cole’s attorneys claimed that he was schizophrenic, suffered from brain damage, and was not competent for execution.

A judge ruled Cole was competent for execution and the US Supreme Court declined to intervene. Oklahoma executed death row inmate Benjamin Cole on Thursday despite his attorneys’ claim that executing him would be a constitutional violation. “Benjamin Cole was a person with serious mental illness whose schizophrenia and brain damage went undiagnosed and untreated for many years, eventually leading to the tragic crime for which he was executed.

Over his years on death row, Ben slipped into a world of delusion and darkness,” attorney Tom Hird said in an email to Insider on Thursday. Fifty-seven-year-old Cole was sentenced to death for the 2002 murder of his 9-month-old daughter, Brianna. According to his attorneys, who tried to stay his execution, he was schizophrenic, suffered from brain damage, and was not competent for execution.

Cole’s legal team called on the United States Supreme Court to intervene on Monday, which they denied on Wednesday. And on Tuesday, they filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma imploring the court to compel a competency hearing for Cole. In a failed petition submitted to the Oklahoma Board of Pardons and Parole in September, Cole’s lawyers asserted that “Benjamin Cole today is a frail, 57-year-old man with a damaged and deteriorating brain, suffering from progressive and severe mental illness who poses no threat to anyone in any way.

“The Board voted against recommending Cole for clemency to Gov. Kevin Stitt. Months prior to the vote, in a two-hour-long July evaluation, one psychologist found that Cole had “a rational understanding of the reason he is being executed by the State of Oklahoma.

” During the evaluation, Cole called himself “a super-duper hyperbolic Jesus freak” that hoped to return “to my Father in Heaven,” the Oklahoman wrote. Based on that examination, a judge ruled on October 4 that Cole was competent to be executed based on a psychological examination in July. In the ruling, Judge Mike Hogan said Cole’s legal team did not establish the “substantial threshold showing of insanity” needed in order to go to trial for a jury to determine Cole’s competency — and fate.

Cole’s defense attorneys argued contrary to the July examination and offered opposing evidence, leading Hogan to assert that both the prosecutors and defense team had “conflicting” claims.  “Benjamin Cole is incapacitated by his mental illness to the point of being essentially nonfunctional,” Hird told Insider. “His own attorneys have not been able to have a meaningful interaction with him for years, and the staff who interact with him in the prison every day confirm that he cannot communicate or take care of his most basic hygiene.

He simply does not have a rational understanding of why Oklahoma seeks to execute him,” he added. In a 193-page case for Cole’s clemency, his attorneys painted the picture that Cole was doomed from the start. Cole’s mother drank and used drugs during her pregnancy with him, subsequently bringing him into a home located in a junkyard where incestual relationships, substance abuse, and physical abuse were the norm.

The clemency petition details Cole’s “extreme religious delusions,” including seeing himself as “David in Psalm 51” and the belief that discussing his past was like his past was “like putting Jesus on the cross again and again which is like doubting your own forgiveness. “Cole’s clemency petition also included details that he was wheelchair-bound, often catatonic, and, at times, refused to leave his cell or communicate with others. Dr.

David George Hough, a psychologist who evaluated Cole in 2016, said Cole “presents as a classic example of a severely regressed chronic schizophrenic patient (with catatonic features), whose condition is likely further compromised by the previously detected brain disorder captured by neuroimaging studies,” the Death Penalty Information Center reported.  He is the second inmate in Oklahoma to die during a spree of executions aiming to clear out more than half of the state’s death row population. Oklahoma’s executions, carried out by the controversial lethal injection process, have seen increased scrutiny in recent years since the botched executions of Clayton Lockett in 2014 and Charles Warner in 2015.

“It is unconscionable that the State denied Ben a competency trial. Ben lacked a rational understanding of why Oklahoma took his life today,” Hird said after Cole’s execution in a statement to Insider. “As Oklahoma proceeds with its relentless march to execute one mentally ill, traumatized man after another, we should pause to ask whether this is really who we are, and who we want to be.

“Read the original article on Insider.