{"id":212591,"date":"2026-03-31T03:50:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-31T03:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/212591\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T03:50:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T03:50:14","slug":"florida-supreme-court-halts-execution-of-former-officer-convicted-of-child-rape-and-murder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/212591\/","title":{"rendered":"Florida Supreme Court halts execution of former officer convicted of child rape and murder"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"text | article-text\">STARKE, Fla. (WCJB) &#8211; The execution of a former police officer convicted of child rape and murder is on pause.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">James Duckett, 68, had been scheduled to die by lethal injection on Tuesday at Florida State Prison near Starke, but the Florida Supreme Court ordered a stay of his execution while a question around DNA testing is being resolved.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">The court ordered an update on all pending issues by Thursday at 5 p.m.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\">Duckett was a police officer in Lake County before he was convicted of the 1987 rape and murder.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text | article-text\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wcjb.com\/newsletter\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Click here<\/a> to subscribe to our newsletter.<\/p>\n<p class=\"copyright |\">Copyright 2026 WCJB. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"STARKE, Fla. (WCJB) &#8211; The execution of a former police officer convicted of child rape and murder is&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":212592,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4536,2195,28,30,29,13153,9552,95312,1933,72926,87750],"class_list":{"0":"post-212591","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-florida","8":"tag-death-row","9":"tag-execution","10":"tag-florida","11":"tag-florida-headlines","12":"tag-florida-news","13":"tag-florida-state-prison","14":"tag-inmate","15":"tag-james-duckett","16":"tag-murder","17":"tag-sex-crime","18":"tag-starke"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}