{"id":355159,"date":"2026-07-28T18:09:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T18:09:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/355159\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T18:09:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T18:09:09","slug":"florida-puts-ex-police-officer-to-death-for-girls-murder-first-of-2-executions-set-for-single-day-associated-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/355159\/","title":{"rendered":"Florida puts ex-police officer to death for girl’s murder, first of 2 executions set for single day | Associated Press"},"content":{"rendered":"

STARKE, Fla. (AP) \u2014 A former police officer convicted of the on-duty rape and murder of a young girl was put to death Tuesday, the first of two lethal injections<\/a> planned for a single day in Florida, hours before an 80-year-old man was to become the second-oldest inmate executed in modern U.S. history.<\/p>\n

Tuesday marked the first time since two convicted murderers were executed on a single day \u2014 in Arkansas in 2017 \u2014 that a state has planned virtually back-to-back executions. It also comes 18 months after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis began stepping up executions at a pace unseen in Florida since the U.S. death penalty was reinstated in 1976, making his the busiest death chamber in the nation.<\/p>\n

Since the beginning of 2025, Florida has carried out nearly half the state executions in the U.S.<\/p>\n

James Aren Duckett, 68, was pronounced dead at 1:19 p.m. following a three-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke. The 11th inmate executed by the state this year, Duckett was convicted of raping and drowning an 11-year-old girl while working as a police officer in a small central Florida city in 1987.<\/p>\n

Duckett declined to make a final statement, responding \u201cno sir\u201d when asked. About 4 minutes after the execution began, the prison’s warden shook Duckett and shouted his name, but there was no response.<\/p>\n

Later Tuesday, barring any last-minute development, 80-year-old Dominick Anthony Occhicone was scheduled to become the oldest prisoner executed in Florida\u2019s modern history starting at 6 p.m. Occhicone was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend\u2019s parents in 1986.<\/p>\n

Until Tuesday, a total of 17 executions had been carried out in the U.S. so far this year, with Florida leading the way with more executions than all other states combined.<\/p>\n

Both men had made last-ditch appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, and last week, the Florida Supreme Court denied appeals by both men to intervene.<\/p>\n

Duckett\u2019s attorneys had unsuccessfully claimed Duckett\u2019s innocence and argued the state\u2019s handling of the DNA evidence is the reason for the inconclusive results.<\/p>\n

Occhicone\u2019s attorneys had argued that several age-related ailments, including kidney and prostate problems, could make his execution especially painful, constituting cruel and unusual punishment.<\/p>\n

DeSantis hasn\u2019t said why he scheduled two executions six hours apart. A Florida prison official said Tuesday morning that the department was confident in its readiness to carry out both executions. All Florida executions are by injection of a sedative, a paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the Department of Corrections.<\/p>\n

Record execution numbers for governor\u2019s final two years<\/p>\n

DeSantis, who leaves office in January, oversaw a record 19 executions in 2025<\/a>, more in a single year than any other Florida governor since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the U.S. in 1976. The previous high was eight executions<\/a> set in 2014.<\/p>\n

Florida has executed 29 people since the beginning of 2025 while the rest of the U.S. states combined have carried out 35 executions over the same time frame.<\/p>\n

If the day\u2019s final execution is carried out Tuesday evening, that would bring total executions for DeSantis\u2019 final two years in office to 31 overall, compared to just nine executions during his first six years in office. With another execution set for August, 2026 could also be a record-breaking year.<\/p>\n

Nationwide, it\u2019s not uncommon for two different states to hold executions on the same date, but it\u2019s less common for a single state to perform two in a day. Before Florida, Arkansas last executed two inmates on the same day by lethal injection three hours apart in April 2017<\/a>. And Texas executed two convicted killers on the same day in 2000, the year the state executed 40 prisoners<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty urged DeSantis ahead of Tuesday to halt both executions.<\/p>\n

\u201cJuly 28 represents an unprecedented escalation of Florida\u2019s use of the death penalty,\u201d the group\u2019s executive director, Grace Hanna, said in a statement. \u201cThese 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Decades on death row<\/p>\n

DeSantis has rarely commented on the pace of executions, but previously said that his goal is to bring justice to victims\u2019 families who have waited decades for death sentences to be carried out.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of these crimes were committed in the \u201980s,\u201d the governor said last year. \u201cJustice 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

If his execution proceeds as planned, Occhicone would become the state\u2019s oldest inmate<\/a> to be executed just weeks after two 74-year-old men briefly held that spot, the second man just a week older than the first at his time of death.<\/p>\n

Occhicone also would become the second-oldest prisoner known to be put to death in modern U.S. history after 83-year-old Walter Moody Jr.<\/a> was executed in Alabama in 2018 for a wave of southern mail bombs in 1989 that killed a federal judge and wounded a Black civil rights attorney.<\/p>\n

Florida executions are all carried out under death warrants signed by the governor<\/p>\n

DeSantis initially signed a death warrant for Duckett in February, scheduling his execution for March 31. But the Florida Supreme Court issued a stay just days before the planned execution to allow for DNA testing of old evidence that couldn\u2019t be performed at the time of the original trial because of technological limitations. The results came back inconclusive, meaning that they did not exonerate Duckett or definitively connect him to the crime. Judges have allowed the jury verdict to stand.<\/p>\n

When Occhicone\u2019s death warrant was signed late last month, his was the only execution scheduled for Tuesday. But after the Florida Supreme Court removed Duckett\u2019s stay on July 8, DeSantis signed a new death<\/a> warrant on July 14 and added Duckett to Occhicone\u2019s execution date, which hadn\u2019t been done in Florida in more than 60 years. Florida Department of Corrections records<\/a> show multiple executions on a single day were more common in the past, with the last being on May 12, 1964.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"STARKE, Fla. (AP) \u2014 A former police officer convicted of the on-duty rape and murder of a young…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":355160,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1312,265,28,144981,30,29,477,1598,1105,1311,1110],"class_list":["post-355159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-capital-punishment","tag-crime","tag-florida","tag-florida-execution-duckett-occhicone","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news","tag-general-news","tag-law-enforcement","tag-legal-proceedings","tag-sexual-assault","tag-u-s-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355159","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=355159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/355160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}