Florida put James Duckett to death by lethal injection on Tuesday, July 28, and did so as the first half of a same-day double execution the state had not attempted since 1964. He was pronounced dead at 1:19 p.m. ET, and Florida was set to execute Dominick Occhicone about five hours later.
Duckett was 68 and a former police officer convicted of killing an 11-year-old girl in 1987. The case dates back to May 11, 1987, when Teresa Mae McAbee walked to a local convenience store in Mascotte to buy a pencil around 10 p.m.; Duckett, then a 29-year-old rookie cop on patrol for the Mascotte Police Department, later said he only spoke with her and a teenage boy and told them to go home, while the boy and his uncle said he put Teresa in his patrol car and drove off.
The execution had been delayed once before. Duckett had been scheduled to die in March, but the Florida Supreme Court granted a rare temporary reprieve while new DNA testing was done. Those tests were inconclusive. When the reprieve expired on July 11, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a death warrant three days later and reset the execution for Tuesday.
That sequence is part of a broader push in Florida under DeSantis, who has said he wants to give closure to families who have waited, sometimes more than four decades, for justice. Opponents of the death penalty say he is instead being driven by political ambition ahead of the 2028 presidential election, and one advocacy group says he is increasingly treating executions as routine instruments of political power.
If Occhicone’s execution goes forward, Florida will have carried out two executions in one day for the first time in more than 60 years. It would also underscore how quickly the state has moved this year: of the 65 inmates executed in the United States since January 2025, Florida has carried out 30, or 46%, and it has accounted for 64% of the nation’s executions.
The next question is no longer whether Florida will break the old pattern. It already has. The real test is how far the state intends to push this pace, and whether the courts or DeSantis will set the limits.
