Benjamin Cole is executed for the murder of his 9-month-old daughter in Oklahoma, USA

Oklahoma, United States, executed by lethal injection Benjamin Cole who was sentenced to death for the murder of his 9-month-old daughter, Brianna Victoria Cole, in 2002, despite objections from defense attorneys who argued that the 57-year-old suffered from schizophrenia and was mentally ill.

The case highlighted a long-standing issue in the US death penalty debate: how it should be applied to those suffering from mental illness. Meanwhile, relatives of the murdered child on Thursday denounced the two-decade period between Brianna’s death and Cole’s execution.

The execution — Oklahoma’s second of 25 scheduled through 2024 — began Thursday at 10:06 am (12:06 pm ET), Oklahoma Department of Corrections chief of operations Justin Farris told the press. Cole was pronounced unconscious at 10:11 am and pronounced dead at 10:22 am.

Cole declined a ceremonial last meal and chose not to have a spiritual counselor with him, Farris said.

Donna Daniel, Brianna’s aunt, thanked the state for serving her sentence and doing justice to her late niece, whom she described as a blond, blue-eyed baby.

“She died a horrible death,” Donna told reporters, adding, “And he recovers easily and gets a little injection in his arm and sleeps on his death. He didn’t give Brianna the chance to grow up, to even have her first Christmas, to meet her family.”

Asked what relatives who witnessed the execution would now do, Brianna’s uncle Bryan Young said: “Get back to normal.”

“As normal as possible,” added Donna, who also told the press: “We shouldn’t wait 20 years for a 9-month-old baby to get justice.”

Cole’s attorney called him a “person with severe mental illness whose schizophrenia and brain damage” led him to murder his daughter, according to a statement. At the time of the crime, Cole had “slipped into a world of illusion and darkness,” said attorney Tom Hird, and “was often unable to interact with my colleagues and me in any meaningful way.”

“Ben didn’t have a rational understanding of why Oklahoma took his life today,” Hird said. “As Oklahoma continues its relentless march to execute one traumatized and mentally ill man after another, we must pause to ask if this is really who we are and who we want to be.”

Executions in Oklahoma

Cole is the second death row inmate sentenced to death in a string of more than two dozen executions that the state of Oklahoma aims to carry out by 2024 — a wave that critics have condemned amid the state’s history of botched lethal injections.

The procedure for Cole on Thursday was “smooth and hassle-free,” Farris told the press.

His last words were a disjointed and often meaningless stream of consciousness that sometimes referred to “Lord” and “Jesus” and was sometimes too silent to decipher, journalists who witnessed them later said.

Cole prayed for the state of Oklahoma and the United States, also stating, “I apologize to everyone I’ve done wrong,” recalled Sean Murphy of the Associated Press.

Both Murphy and Nolan Clay of The Oklahoman newspaper — each of whom has indicated he witnessed multiple executions — described Cole’s execution as similar to others they had seen.

Cole’s lawyers insisted that he should not be killed because his mental condition — amplified by his exposure as a child to drugs and alcohol, substance abuse issues, and physical and sexual abuse — had deteriorated so much that he was not competent to be executed. , according to a petition for mercy in a failed attempt at mercy.

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday denied Cole’s request to delay the execution. Cole’s lawyers also unsuccessfully asked a state appeals court to compel the prison warden to refer his case for review to the district attorney to initiate a jurisdictional hearing.