STARKE, Fla. (AP) — A former police officer convicted of the on-duty rape and murder of a young girl was put to death Tuesday, the first of two lethal injections planned for a single day in Florida, hours before an 80-year-old man was to become the second-oldest inmate executed in modern U.S. history.
Tuesday marked the first time since two convicted murderers were executed on a single day — in Arkansas in 2017 — that a state has planned virtually
back-to-back executions. It also comes 18 months after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis began stepping up executions at a pace unseen in Florida since the U.S. death penalty was reinstated in 1976, making his the busiest death chamber in the nation.
James Aren Duckett, 68, was pronounced dead at 1:19 p.m. following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. The 11th inmate executed by the state this year, Duckett was convicted of raping and drowning an 11-year-old girl while working as a police officer in a small central Florida city in 1987.
Later Tuesday, barring any last-minute development, 80-year-old Dominick Anthony Occhicone was scheduled to become the oldest prisoner executed in Florida’s modern history starting at 6 p.m. Occhicone was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents in 1986.
Until Tuesday, a total of 17 executions had been carried out in the U.S. so far this year, with Florida leading the way with more executions than all other states combined.
Both men had made last-ditch appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, and last week, the Florida Supreme Court denied appeals by both men to intervene.
Duckett’s attorneys had unsuccessfully claimed Duckett’s innocence and argued the state’s handling of the DNA evidence is the reason for the inconclusive results.
Occhicone’s attorneys had argued that several age-related ailments, including kidney and prostate problems, could make his execution especially painful, constituting cruel and unusual punishment.
DeSantis hasn’t said why he scheduled two executions six hours apart, and Florida prison officials haven’t said whether the timing posed any logistical challenges. All Florida executions are by injection of a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the Department of Corrections.
DeSantis, who leaves office in January, oversaw a record 19 executions in 2025, more in a single year than any other Florida governor since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the U.S. in 1976. The previous high was eight executions set in 2014.
If the day’s final execution is carried out Tuesday evening, that would bring total executions for DeSantis’ final two years in office to 31 overall, compared to just nine executions during his first six years in office. With another execution set for August, 2026 could also be a record-breaking year.
Nationwide, it’s not uncommon for two different states to hold executions on the same date, but it’s less common for a single state to perform two in a day. Before Florida, Arkansas last executed two inmates on the same day by lethal injection three hours apart in April 2017. And Texas executed two convicted killers on the same day in 2000, the year the state executed 40 prisoners.
Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty urged DeSantis ahead of Tuesday to halt both executions.
“July 28 represents an unprecedented escalation of Florida’s use of the death penalty,” the group’s executive director, Grace Hanna, said in a statement. “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 rarely commented on the pace of executions, but previously said that his goal is to bring justice to victims’ families who have waited decades for death sentences to be carried out.
“Some of these crimes were committed in the ’80s,” the governor said at a news conference last year. “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 planned, Occhicone would become the state’s oldest inmate to be executed just weeks after two 74-year-old men briefly held that spot, the second man just a week older than the first at his time of death.
Occhicone also would become the second-oldest prisoner known to be put to death in modern U.S. history 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 judge and wounded a Black civil rights attorney.
DeSantis initially signed a death warrant for Duckett in February, scheduling his execution for March 31. But the Florida Supreme Court issued a stay just days before the planned execution to allow for DNA testing of old evidence that couldn’t be performed at the time of the original trial because of technological limitations. The results came back inconclusive, meaning that they did not exonerate Duckett or definitively connect him to the crime. Judges have allowed the jury verdict to stand.
When Occhicone’s death warrant was signed late last month, his was the only execution scheduled for Tuesday. But after the Florida Supreme Court removed Duckett’s stay on July 8, DeSantis signed a new death warrant on July 14 and added Duckett to Occhicone’s execution date, which hadn’t been done in Florida in more than 60 years. Florida Department of Corrections records show multiple executions on a single day were more common in the past, with the last being on May 12, 1964.
