Florida is set to become the first state in nearly a decade to carry out two executions in a single day, planning lethal injections for 68-year-old former police officer James Aren Duckett and 80-year-old Dominick Anthony Occhicone. Duckett, convicted of the 1987 rape and drowning of an 11-year-old girl in central Florida, is scheduled to die at noon at Florida State Prison near Starke, followed six hours later by Occhicone, who was convicted of the 1986 killings of his ex-girlfriend’s parents. Occhicone will become Florida’s oldest executed inmate and the second-oldest in modern U.S. history, trailing only 83-year-old Walter Moody Jr., who was executed in Alabama in 2018. If carried out, these will be Florida’s 11th and 12th executions of the year, bringing the total for Governor Ron DeSantis’s final two years in office to 31 following a significant surge in executions that began 18 months prior.
The Florida Supreme Court recently denied appeals for both men, leaving their remaining legal challenges pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. Duckett’s attorneys had unsuccessfully sought a further stay based on inconclusive modern DNA testing of old evidence, while Occhicone’s legal team argued that age-related ailments including kidney and prostate issues would make his execution an unconstitutionally painful form of cruel and unusual punishment. Although DeSantis initially scheduled Occhicone’s execution for Tuesday, he added Duckett to the same date after the state Supreme Court lifted a previous DNA-related stay, marking the first time Florida has scheduled multiple executions on a single day since May 1964. While individual states carrying out double executions are rare—with Arkansas last doing so in April 2017—Governor DeSantis has defended the accelerated pace as a necessary step to bring long-awaited justice to victims’ families for crimes dating back to the 1980s, stating that he believes justice delayed is justice denied.
