Florida to carry out double execution for first time in over 60 years

Florida is set to execute former cop James Duckett at noon ET on July 28 for an 11-year-old girl’s murder in 1987. Six hours later, they plan to execute Dominick Occhicone for a 1986 double murder.

Florida is planning to carry out two executions on the same day for the first time in more than six decades as the state cements its new status as the busiest in the nation when it comes to the death penalty.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has rescheduled the execution of James Duckett for 12 p.m. ET on July 28, the same day that another inmate − Dominick Anthony Occhicone, Jr. − had already been set to be put to death. Occhicone’s execution is set for 6 p.m. ET.

Duckett, a former police officer, was supposed to be executed in March for the 1987 murder of an 11-year-old girl, but he won a rare temporary reprieve from the Florida Supreme Court pending the results of new DNA testing. The testing was inconclusive and Duckett’s reprieve expired July 11. DeSantis rescheduled his execution in a death warrant signed July 14.

If both Duckett’s and Occhicone’s executions move forward, it will be the first time since 1964 that Florida will have executed two inmates on the same day, according to an execution database by the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.

The rare double execution comes amid an aggressive push by DeSantis to put more inmates to death than the state ever has before. Of the 64 inmates executed in the United States since January 2025, Florida has carried out 29 of them under DeSantis. That’s 45%, according to an analysis by USA TODAY. Since the start of this year, Florida has carried out 58% of the executions in the United States.

DeSantis has said he wants to give closure to families who have waited sometimes more than four decades for their loved ones’ killers to be executed.

But the Republican’s actions are drawing increasing criticism from death penalty opponents and observers who say the governor is being motivated by political ambition ahead of the 2028 presidential election and is “increasingly treating executions as routine instruments of political power,” according to a recent statement from Floridians Against the Death Penalty.

The governor’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY on July 15.

Here’s what you need to know about Duckett’s and Occhicone’s crimes, their upcoming executions and more about what is going on in Florida.

What was James Duckett convicted of?

On May 11, 1987, the fates of 29-year-old rookie cop James “Jimmy” Duckett and 11-year-old Teresa Mae McAbee became intertwined.

Teresa walked to her local Circle K convenience store to buy a pencil around 10 p.m. in Mascotte, Florida, a rural city just west of Orlando that had fewer than 2,000 residents at the time.

Duckett was on patrol for the Mascotte Police Department. The married father of two sons, who had been on the force for seven months, was making his regular rounds and stopped at the Circle K, spotting Teresa talking with a 16-year-old boy outside the store, according to court records.

Duckett has always maintained that he talked to Teresa and the teen, telling each to go home. But the boy and his uncle later said that Duckett put Teresa in his patrol car and drove off.

Teresa’s mother arrived at the Circle K around 11 p.m., looking for her daughter. The store clerk told her that Teresa may have gone with Duckett, and the mother began searching the area. When she couldn’t find Teresa, she contacted the police and later filed a missing persons report with Duckett, the only officer on patrol at the time.

The next morning, less than a mile from the Circle K, a fisherman found Teresa’s body in Knight Lake. A medical examiner later found that she had been raped, strangled and was still alive when her attacker drowned her. Bodily fluid, presumably from the killer, was found on her underwear − DNA that was saved.

Duckett became a suspect when a sheriff’s investigator, Sgt. Chuck Johnson, thought the officer was acting nervous at the scene of the body recovery, “was not curious about the death,” and told a “rehearsed-sounding story” about his interaction with Teresa and the events of the night before.

Duckett was charged with murder five months later. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

What was Dominick Anthony Occhicone Jr. convicted of?

In the early morning hours of June 10, 1986, an angry Dominick Anthony Occhicone Jr. went to the home of his ex-fiancée, Anita Gerrety, in the coastal community of Holiday, Florida, about 30 miles northwest of Tampa, according to court records.

As Occhicone knocked on windows and doors, he was confronted by Gerrety’s 66-year-old father, Raymon Artzner. According to court records, Occhicone smiled at Gerrety as he shot her father dead, then ran into the house and fatally shot her 62-year-old mother, Martha Artzner. Gerrety and her 10-year-old daughter were able to escape.

He was sentenced to death for each of the murders.

Now 80, Occhicone is set to become the oldest death row inmate executed in Florida history and the second oldest in U.S. history.

What has been happening in Florida?

Since January 2025, Florida has become the busiest state in the nation for executions. So far this year, the Sunshine State has executed more inmates than all other states combined. Florida has put 10 inmates to death, while Texas, Oklahoma, and Arizona, have executed seven inmates combined.

Texas remains the state that has executed the most inmates and is likely to retain that distinction for some time, having executed 600 inmates since 1976, which is considered the start of the modern era of the death penalty. Florida is the next closest state at 135 executions during that same time period, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

DeSantis is driving the increase in executions in Florida. He not only has signed more death warrants than any other governor in the state’s history, he signed legislation in 2023 that added the death penalty as a possible punishment for people con­victed of sex crimes against chil­dren. He also signed a law in 2025 that broadly expanded the state’s execution methods to include anything “not deemed unconstitutional.” Since no execution method has ever been declared unconstitutional, experts say the law technically allows any method imaginable, from hanging to stoning.

For death penalty critics and observers, the double execution now scheduled later this month for Duckett and Occhicone is par for the course. They question why the state is set to execute an 80-year-old man after all these years and argue that more time is needed to analyze the DNA in Duckett’s case because recent test results were inconclusive.

“Governor DeSantis’s secretive, self-serving pursuit of a record-setting number of executions ignores the trauma that carrying out two executions in a single day will inflict on prison staff,” Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told USA TODAY. “His rush to kill an elderly 80-year-old man and a man who may be innocent only proves the reckless disregard with which he is making these decisions.”

DeSantis recently told ProPublica that meeting with the loved ones of victims reinforced his determination to see old death sentences carried out.

“There’s a saying: Justice delayed is justice denied,” DeSantis said. “We’re doing it to be able to bring justice to the victims’ families.”

Contributing: C. A. Bridges, USA TODAY Network – Florida 

Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter who covers cold case investigations and the death penalty for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.