A former police officer convicted of the on-duty rape and homicide of a younger woman was put to death Tuesday, the first of two lethal injections deliberate for a single day in Florida, hours earlier than an 80-year-old man was to develop into the second-oldest inmate executed in fashionable U.S. historical past.
Tuesday marked the first time since two convicted murderers had been executed on a single day — in Arkansas in 2017 — {that a} state has deliberate nearly back-to-back executions. The execution additionally comes 18 months after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis started stepping up executions at a tempo unseen in Florida because the US death penalty was reinstated in 1976, making his the busiest death chamber within the nation.
James Aren Duckett, 68, was pronounced useless at 1:19 p.m. following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison close to Starke. The eleventh inmate executed by the state this yr, Duckett was convicted of raping and drowning an 11-year-old woman whereas working as a police officer in a small central Florida metropolis in 1987.
Later Tuesday, barring any last-minute growth, 80-year-old Dominick Anthony Occhicone was scheduled to develop into the oldest prisoner executed in Florida’s fashionable historical past beginning at 6 p.m. Occhicone was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend’s mother and father in 1986.
Until Tuesday, a complete of 17 executions had been carried out within the US to this point this yr, with Florida main the way in which with extra executions than all different states mixed.
Both males had made last-ditch appeals to the US Supreme Court, and final week, the Florida Supreme Court denied appeals by each males to intervene.
Duckett’s attorneys had unsuccessfully claimed Duckett’s innocence and argued the state’s dealing with of the DNA proof is the rationale for the inconclusive outcomes.
Occhicone’s attorneys had argued that a number of age-related illnesses, together with kidney and prostate issues, might make his execution particularly painful, constituting merciless and strange punishment.
DeSantis hasn’t stated why he scheduled two executions six hours aside, and Florida jail officers haven’t stated whether or not the timing posed any logistical challenges. All Florida executions are by injection of a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the guts, in accordance to the Department of Corrections.
DeSantis, who leaves workplace in January, oversaw a record 19 executions in 2025, extra in a single yr than another Florida governor because the reinstatement of the death penalty within the US in 1976. The earlier excessive was eight executions set in 2014.
If the day’s closing execution is carried out Tuesday night, that may convey whole executions for DeSantis’ closing two years in workplace to 31 general, in contrast to simply 9 executions throughout his first six years in workplace. With one other execution set for August, 2026 may be a record-breaking yr.
Nationwide, it’s not unusual for two totally different states to maintain executions on the identical date, but it surely’s much less frequent for a single state to carry out two in a day. Before Florida, Arkansas final executed two inmates on the identical day by deadly injection three hours aside in April 2017. And Texas executed two convicted killers on the identical day in 2000, the yr the state executed 40 prisoners.
Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty urged DeSantis forward of Tuesday to halt each executions.
“July 28 represents an unprecedented escalation of Florida’s use of the death penalty,” the group’s government director, Grace Hanna, stated in an announcement. “These are two profoundly different cases, but they point to the same troubling reality: Florida continues to expand the use of capital punishment, despite mounting evidence that it is not what Floridians want.”
DeSantis has hardly ever commented on the tempo of executions, however beforehand stated that his aim is to convey justice to victims’ households who’ve waited many years for death sentences to be carried out.
“Some of these crimes were committed in the ’80s,” the governor stated at a information convention final yr. “Justice delayed is justice denied. I felt I owed it to them to make sure this ran very smoothly. If I honestly thought someone was innocent, I would not pull the trigger.”
If his execution proceeds as deliberate, Occhicone would develop into the state’s oldest inmate to be executed simply weeks after two 74-year-old males briefly held that spot, the second man only a week older than the first at his time of death.
Occhicone additionally would develop into the second-oldest prisoner identified to be put to death in fashionable US historical past after 83-year-old Walter Moody Jr. was executed in Alabama in 2018 for a wave of Southern mail bombs in 1989 that killed a federal decide and wounded a Black civil rights lawyer.
DeSantis initially signed a death warrant for Duckett in February, scheduling his execution for March 31. But the Florida Supreme Court issued a keep simply days earlier than the deliberate execution to enable for DNA testing of outdated proof that couldn’t be carried out on the time of the unique trial as a result of of technological limitations. The outcomes got here again inconclusive, that means that they didn’t exonerate Duckett or definitively join him to the crime. Judges have allowed the jury verdict to stand.
When Occhicone’s death warrant was signed late final month, his was the one execution scheduled for Tuesday. But after the Florida Supreme Court eliminated Duckett’s keep on July 8, DeSantis signed a new death warrant on July 14 and added Duckett to Occhicone’s execution date, which hadn’t been executed in Florida in additional than 60 years. Florida Department of Corrections records present a number of executions on a single day had been extra frequent previously, with the final being on May 12, 1964.
