Free Republic

A convicted killer in Oklahoma was executed Thursday despite his lawyers arguing he was mentally ill and unaware of his imminent death. Benjamin Cole, 57, was pronounced dead at 10:22 a.m. local time at Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, attorney Tom Hird told The Post. Cole was sentenced to death in 2004 for the Dec. 20, 2002, murder of his 9-month-old daughter. CNN reported after the baby’s cries interrupted Cole’s video game, he broke her spine.

Ben Affleck tried to sell his sprawling Greek Revival “imitation” plantation — the site of his elaborate wedding to Jennifer Lopez Saturday — three years after revelations surfaced that one of his ancestors was a slave-owning Georgia sheriff. In 2015, the Hollywood actor tried to suppress details about Benjamin Cole, a relative on his mother’s side who owned several slaves in Chatham County, near his 87-acre Hampton Island property. Affleck purchased the property in 2003, according to reports. The revelations about Cole were made on PBS’s “Finding Your Roots” hosted by Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Affleck put...

Movie star Ben Affleck has another nine slaveholder ancestors from Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, according to publicly available Census records and genealogy research conducted by Breitbart News. Last week, Affleck admitted that he successfully pressured Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates to edit his Georgia slaveholding ancestor, Benjamin Cole, out of an episode of the PBS series “Finding Your Roots” that featured his family history. This brings the number of Affleck’s known slaveholder ancestors to 12, who owned a total of 214 slaves. The relative ease with which Breitbart News was able to find these nine additional slaveholding...