Florida puts ex-officer and 80-year-old man to death in first double execution since 1964

Overview

On July 28, 2026, Florida executed two men by lethal injection about six hours apart, the first time the state had carried out two executions on a single day since 1964. The back-to-back killings at Florida State Prison in Starke raised Florida's 2026 death count to 12, more than all other states combined, and cemented the state's role as the nation's most aggressive user of capital punishment.

The two executions

James Duckett, a 68-year-old former police officer, was pronounced dead at 1:19 p.m. He had been convicted of raping and drowning 11-year-old Teresa McAbee after picking her up in his squad car in 1987. Asked for a final statement, he said only "No sir." The warden shook him four minutes into the execution and received no response. Six hours later, at 6 p.m., 80-year-old Dominick Occhicone was executed for the 1986 murders of his ex-girlfriend's parents. Occhicone became the oldest person killed by Florida since the death penalty's reinstatement in 1976 and only the second octogenarian executed in the United States in half a century.

Legal and political drivers

The acceleration traces back to laws Florida's Republican-controlled legislature passed in 2023 that allow a jury to recommend a death sentence with only eight of 12 votes, the lowest threshold in the country. Only Alabama permits a non-unanimous recommendation, and it requires ten votes. Governor Ron DeSantis, now in the final year of his second term, signed those laws and has since made Florida's death chamber the busiest in the nation. In 2025, Florida executed 19 of the 47 people put to death across the US. By Tuesday, the state had accounted for 12 of the 19 executions nationwide in 2026.

National context

Under the Trump administration, the federal government has encouraged state prosecutors to seek the death penalty aggressively, reversing the previous administration's commutation of nearly all federal death sentences. The result has been a near doubling of US executions between 2024 and 2025, driven largely by Florida. The last time any state executed two inmates on the same day was in Arkansas in 2017. Florida's last double execution, using the electric chair, occurred in 1964.

Last appeals and reactions

Both men appealed to the US Supreme Court, which denied their requests on Tuesday without opinion or recorded dissent. Florida's Supreme Court had declined to intervene the week before. Duckett's lawyers had argued that new DNA testing of evidence could prove his innocence; a similar appeal had suspended his earlier March execution date before failing. Occhicone's legal team raised his age and conditions including kidney and prostate disease. After Duckett's death, the victim's mother Dorthy Tula told reporters outside the prison that she had "waited nearly 40 years" for justice.

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