Florida is on track to become the first state in nearly a decade to execute two inmates on the same day, with lethal injections scheduled Tuesday for a former police officer convicted of killing a young girl and an 80-year-old man who would become the second-oldest person put to death in modern American history.
The back-to-back executions come roughly 18 months after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis began accelerating the pace of executions in Florida at a rate not seen in the state’s modern era. DeSantis has not publicly explained why he chose to schedule the two executions six hours apart, and Florida prison officials have not addressed whether the back-to-back timing poses any operational difficulties for corrections staff.
James Aren Duckett, 68, is set to receive a lethal injection at noon at Florida State Prison near Starke. Six hours later, 80-year-old Dominick Anthony Occhicone is scheduled to be executed — a death that would also make him the oldest inmate ever executed in Florida’s modern history.
Duckett was found guilty of raping and drowning an 11-year-old girl in 1987 while he was working as a police officer in a small central Florida city. Occhicone was convicted of fatally shooting his ex-girlfriend’s parents in 1986.
Should both sentences be carried out, Duckett and Occhicone would become the 11th and 12th inmates executed in Florida this year.
The Florida Supreme Court rejected appeals from both men last week. Duckett’s legal team had sought a new stay, arguing he is innocent and that the state’s handling of DNA evidence led to inconclusive test results. Attorneys for Occhicone contended that several age-related health conditions — including kidney and prostate problems — could make his execution unusually painful, which they argued would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Both men still had appeals pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
DeSantis, who is set to leave office in January, has overseen a record 19 executions in 2025 — more in a single year than any Florida governor since capital punishment was reinstated in the United States in 1976. The previous single-year record was eight executions, set in 2014.
If Tuesday’s executions go forward, DeSantis will have overseen 31 executions in just his final two years in office, compared to nine during the first six years of his administration. With another execution already scheduled for August, 2026 could also break records.
DeSantis originally signed a death warrant for Duckett in February, setting a March 31 execution date. However, the Florida Supreme Court issued a stay just days before that date to allow DNA testing of older evidence that could not be analyzed at the time of the original trial due to technological limitations. The results were inconclusive — neither clearing Duckett nor definitively linking him to the crime — and judges have allowed the jury’s conviction to stand.
Occhicone’s death warrant was signed late last month, and his was initially the only execution on the calendar for Tuesday. But after the Florida Supreme Court lifted Duckett’s stay on July 8, DeSantis quickly signed a new death warrant and added Duckett to the same execution date — something that had not been done in Florida in more than 60 years. State Department of Corrections records show that multiple executions in a single day were more common historically, with the last occurring on May 12, 1964.
Across the country, it is not unusual for two different states to carry out executions on the same date, but it is far less common for one state to do so. The most recent example before Florida was Arkansas in April 2017. Texas also executed two convicted killers on the same day back in 2000, the year it put 40 people to death.
The advocacy group Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty has called on DeSantis to stop both executions. The group’s executive director, Grace Hanna, released a statement saying: “July 28 represents an unprecedented escalation of Florida’s use of the death penalty. These are two profoundly different cases, but they point to the same troubling reality: Florida continues to expand the use of capital punishment, despite mounting evidence that it is not what Floridians want.”
The governor’s office has seldom commented on individual executions over the past year and a half. DeSantis has previously stated that his goal is to deliver justice to the families of victims who have waited decades for sentences to be carried out.
“Some of these crimes were committed in the ’80s,” DeSantis said at a November 2025 news conference. “Justice delayed is justice denied. I felt I owed it to them to make sure this ran very smoothly. If I honestly thought someone was innocent, I would not pull the trigger.”
Occhicone would surpass Florida’s current record for oldest inmate executed — a mark set just weeks ago when two 74-year-old men were executed within a week of each other. The recent string of executions has drawn renewed national attention to the aging population on death row and raised ethical questions about carrying out capital punishment on elderly inmates who may be near the end of their natural lives.
On a national level, Occhicone would become the second-oldest person executed in modern U.S. history, behind 83-year-old Walter Moody Jr., who was put to death in Alabama in 2018. Moody had been condemned for a series of mail bombings in 1989 that killed a federal judge and injured a Black civil rights attorney.
All Florida executions are carried out by injecting a three-drug combination: a sedative, a paralytic agent, and a drug that stops the heart, according to the state Department of Corrections.
