The Florida double execution carried out on July 28 marked the first time in more than six decades that the state put two people to death on the same day. James Duckett died by lethal injection at 1:19 p.m. Eastern time. Dominick Occhicone followed roughly five hours later, pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m.

The last time Florida did this was 1964. The last time any American state did it was Arkansas in 2017.

Two Cases, Four Decades Apart From Justice

Duckett, 68, was a former police officer convicted of killing an 11-year-old girl in 1987. Occhicone, 80, was condemned for shooting his ex-fiancée’s parents in 1986. He became the oldest person Florida has ever executed and the second-oldest in the history of the United States.

Both men had spent close to forty years on death row. Both left behind families who had waited nearly as long for the sentences to be carried out.

The Killing of Teresa McAbee

On the night of May 11, 1987, 11-year-old Teresa Mae McAbee walked to a convenience store in Mascotte, a small farming town west of Orlando with fewer than 2,000 residents at the time. She went to buy a pencil.

James Duckett, then a 29-year-old rookie officer with the Mascotte Police Department, was on patrol. Married with two young sons, he encountered Teresa outside the store speaking with a 16-year-old boy.

Duckett’s account never changed: he told both of them to go home. The teenager and his uncle told a different story, saying Duckett placed Teresa in his squad car and drove away.

Around 11 p.m., Teresa’s mother arrived looking for her. A clerk suggested she may have left with the officer. After searching without success, the mother filed a missing persons report with the only patrolman working that night, which was Duckett himself.

A fisherman found her body the next morning in Knight Lake, less than a mile from the store. The medical examiner determined she had been raped and strangled, and was still breathing when she was drowned. Biological evidence recovered from her clothing was preserved.

Suspicion turned toward Duckett after a sheriff’s investigator noticed his behavior at the recovery scene. He seemed anxious, showed no curiosity about how the child had died, and delivered an account of the previous evening that struck the investigator as scripted. Charges followed five months later, and a jury sent him to death row.

Duckett came within days of execution in March before the Florida Supreme Court granted a rare stay so newer DNA testing could be conducted. Those results proved inconclusive. The reprieve lapsed on July 11, and Governor Ron DeSantis signed a fresh death warrant three days later.

Teresa’s mother, Dorothy Tula, watched him die. She managed a single sentence before breaking down entirely, saying she had waited forty years for this. Her sister, Shirly Lancaster, steadied her and spoke for the family, saying the state had allowed him to live far too long. Teresa was only eleven, she said. She might have become a doctor or a president. Nobody will ever know.

The Murders in Holiday, Florida

Early on June 10, 1986, Dominick Occhicone drove to the home of his former fiancée, Anita Gerrity, in the coastal town of Holiday, about thirty miles from Tampa. He began pounding on the windows and doors.

Gerrity’s 66-year-old father, Raymon Artzner, came out to confront him. Court records describe Occhicone smiling as he shot the older man. He then entered the house and killed Gerrity’s 62-year-old mother, Martha Artzner. Gerrity and her 10-year-old daughter got out alive.

His defense argued temporary insanity, describing a man overwhelmed by alcohol, jealousy and rage. After the guilty verdict, his lawyers pushed for a life term instead, telling jurors that prison ages people so severely that inmates rarely survive into their nineties. Occhicone lived to eighty. Jurors voted seven to five for death, and the judge concurred.

The family’s frustration surfaced publicly long ago. In 1997, eleven years after the murders, the victims’ son told a Tampa newspaper that justice remained unfinished and asked when it would ever end. That was thirty-one years ago.

After witnessing the execution, the Artzner family described the close of a long and painful journey. Their statement listed what the decades had held: sleepless nights, empty seats at family gatherings, conversations that never happened, birthdays and ordinary joys taken from them. The execution does not erase the grief, they said, but it shuts a door that stayed open far too long.

Florida’s Execution Surge

Florida has become the center of capital punishment in America.

Of the 66 executions carried out nationwide since January 2025, Florida accounts for 31 of them, or roughly 47 percent. This year alone the state has performed about 63 percent of all executions in the country. Its twelve executions in 2026 exceed the combined total of every other state.

The state is also executing older prisoners at a rate no one else approaches. Across 2025 and 2026, six states have put to death 25 inmates aged 62 or older. Eighteen of those took place in Florida.

DeSantis has signed more death warrants than any governor in state history. In 2023 he approved legislation making the death penalty available for certain sex crimes against children. In 2025 he signed a law permitting any execution method not deemed unconstitutional — and since no method has ever been formally ruled out, critics note the statute leaves the door open to almost anything.

The governor frames it as obligation. He has said meeting victims’ families strengthened his resolve, invoking the maxim that justice delayed becomes justice denied.

The Criticism

Opponents see political calculation ahead of a possible 2028 presidential run. One Florida advocacy group accused him of treating executions as routine instruments of power.

Robin Maher, who directs the Death Penalty Information Center, questioned the human cost of two executions in a single shift, including on prison staff, and objected to executing a frail 80-year-old alongside a man whose DNA evidence remained unresolved.

The governor’s office has not responded to those allegations