The Florida double execution planned for Tuesday would make the state the first in nearly ten years to put two prisoners to death within a single day. The two lethal injections are scheduled six hours apart at Florida State Prison near Starke, and one of them would set a grim record: an 80-year-old man becoming the second-oldest inmate executed anywhere in the United States in the modern era.

Neither the governor’s office nor state corrections officials have explained the decision to schedule both on the same date, or addressed whether the compressed timeline places any burden on the staff who must carry them out.

The Two Men

James Aren Duckett, 68, is set to be executed at noon. He was working as a police officer in a small central Florida city when he was convicted of raping and drowning an 11-year-old girl in 1987.

Dominick Anthony Occhicone, 80, is scheduled to die later the same day. His conviction stems from the 1986 killings of the parents of his former girlfriend. If the execution proceeds, he becomes the oldest person put to death in Florida’s modern history.

Together they would represent the eleventh and twelfth executions carried out by the state this year.

Last-Minute Legal Arguments

Both men saw appeals rejected by the Florida Supreme Court last week, and both still had petitions pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Duckett’s attorneys sought another stay on the grounds that he is innocent, arguing that the state’s handling of DNA evidence explains why testing failed to produce a clear answer. Occhicone’s lawyers took a different approach, contending that several age-related medical conditions, including kidney and prostate problems, could make the lethal injection unusually painful and therefore constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

Duckett had already come close once before. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a death warrant for him in February with an execution date of March 31. Days before that date, the state’s highest court granted a stay so that older evidence could undergo DNA testing that had not been technologically possible at the time of the original trial.

The results settled nothing. They neither cleared Duckett nor tied him definitively to the crime. Courts allowed the original jury verdict to stand, and on July 8 the Florida Supreme Court lifted the stay. A new death warrant followed shortly afterward, placing Duckett on the date already reserved for Occhicone.

A Practice Not Seen in Decades

Scheduling two executions for the same day is not something Florida has done in more than sixty years. Department of Corrections records show that multiple executions on a single date were routine in earlier eras, with the most recent instance occurring in May 1964.

Nationally, it is fairly common for two different states to hold executions on the same day. A single state doing so is rarer. Before this week, the last state to execute two prisoners on one date was Arkansas in April 2017. Texas did the same in 2000, a year in which it executed 40 people.

A Record-Setting Stretch for the Governor

The pace of executions in Florida over the past year and a half has no modern precedent in the state.

DeSantis oversaw 19 executions in 2025, more than any Florida governor since capital punishment was reinstated nationally in 1976. The previous record was eight, set in 2014.

The contrast within his own tenure is stark. His first six years in office produced nine executions. If Tuesday proceeds as planned, his final two years will account for 31. With another execution already on the calendar for August, this year could surpass last year’s total. DeSantis leaves office in January.

The governor’s office has said little publicly about individual cases during this period. His broader rationale, offered at a news conference in late 2025, centers on families who have waited decades for sentences to be carried out. He noted that many of these crimes date to the 1980s, argued that delayed justice amounts to denied justice, and said he would not proceed if he genuinely believed someone was innocent.

Opposition and Objections

Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty has called on the governor to stop both executions.

Grace Hanna, the organization’s executive director, described the date as an unprecedented escalation in how the state uses capital punishment. She acknowledged that the two cases differ substantially from one another but argued that together they illustrate an expansion of executions occurring despite what she characterized as growing evidence that Floridians do not support it.

The Aging Death Row Problem

Occhicone’s case touches a question that has surfaced repeatedly in recent months: what it means to execute people who are elderly and ill.

He would take the record for oldest inmate executed in Florida only weeks after two 74-year-old men briefly held that distinction, the second older than the first by a single week at the time of his death. Nationally, Occhicone would rank second only to Walter Moody Jr., who was 83 when Alabama executed him in 2018 for a mail bombing campaign in 1989 that killed a federal judge and injured a civil rights attorney.

The pattern reflects arithmetic more than policy. Prisoners sentenced in the 1980s who have exhausted decades of appeals are now in their seventies and eighties. As states accelerate executions, the people reached are increasingly men who might plausibly die of natural causes before the state gets to them.

That reality has prompted renewed argument over whether executing the very old and the seriously ill serves any purpose the death penalty is supposed to serve, and whether frail bodies complicate the procedure itself, which is precisely the claim Occhicone’s lawyers advanced.

The Method

Florida carries out executions using a three-drug sequence administered by injection: a sedative, followed by a paralytic agent, followed by a drug that stops the heart.

Whether both procedures go forward Tuesday depends on the U.S. Supreme Court, which had not ruled on the pending petitions.