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See the full story · 3 sourcesJames Aren Duckett, 68, was pronounced dead at 1:19 pm following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison
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Florida executed a former police officer on Tuesday , convicted of the on-duty rape and murder of a young girl. This was the first of two lethal injections scheduled for the day, with an 80-year-old man set to become the second-oldest inmate executed in modern U.S. history just hours later.
Tuesday's dual executions were a rare event , marking the first time a state has planned virtually back-to-back lethal injections since Arkansas in 2017. This intensified schedule reflects a broader trend under Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who, over the past 18 months, has significantly increased the pace of executions in Florida. This rate is unprecedented since the U.S. death penalty was reinstated in 1976, positioning Florida as the nation's busiest death chamber.
Remarkably, since the beginning of 2025, Florida has been responsible for nearly half of all state executions conducted across the United States.
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.
Duckett declined to make a final statement, responding “no sir” when asked. About 4 minutes after the execution began, the prison's warden shook Duckett and shouted his name, but there was no response.
Later on Tuesday, 80-year-old Dominick Anthony Occhicone was scheduled to become the oldest prisoner executed in Florida’s modern history, with his execution set for 6 p.m. Occhicone was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend’s parents in 1986.
Until Tuesday, the U.S. had seen 17 executions this year, with Florida responsible for more 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 death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976. The previous high was eight executions set in 2014.
If Tuesday’s executions proceed, that would bring the total for DeSantis’ final two years in office up to 31 overall, compared to just nine executions during the first six years of his administration. With another execution already set for August, 2026 could also be a record-breaking year.
DeSantis initially signed a death warrant for Duckett in February, setting a March 31 execution date. But the Florida Supreme Court issued a stay just days ahead of that date 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 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 soon after 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.
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. Before Florida, the most recent U.S. state to execute two inmates on the same day was Arkansas in April 2017. And Texas executed two convicted killers on the same day in 2000, the year it put to death 40 prisoners.
Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty has urged DeSantis 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.”
The governor's office has rarely commented on executions over the past 18 months. DeSantis has previously said 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 November 2025 news conference. “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.”
Occhicone would become Florida'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. Recent executions have highlighted the nation's aging death-row population and renewed questions about the humanity of administering capital punishment to inmates who might die soon f...
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