Florida put to death a former police officer convicted of raping and drowning an 11-year-old girl while on duty in 1987, the first of two lethal injections the state carried out on the same day for the first time in nearly 60 years.
James Aren Duckett, 68, was pronounced dead at 1:19 p.m. Tuesday at Florida State Prison near Starke, Florida, after receiving a three-drug lethal injection. Duckett had been convicted of raping and drowning Teresa McAbee while working as a police officer in central Florida. He was the sole officer on patrol in Mascotte, a small town near Orlando, when the child was last seen getting into his patrol car, the New York Post reported. Witnesses placed the girl in Duckett's vehicle. DNA, hair, and fingerprint evidence linked him to the crime.
The execution made Duckett the 11th inmate Florida has put to death in 2026, more than all other states combined this year. A second execution, that of 80-year-old Dominick Anthony Occhicone, was scheduled for 6 p.m. the same day. Occhicone was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend's parents in 1986.
Asked if he wished to make a final statement, Duckett said two words: "No sir." He maintained his innocence to the end. His attorney, Mary Elizabeth Wells, told reporters that Duckett "has consistently maintained his innocence," per the Post's reporting.
The jury that convicted him nearly four decades ago saw it differently. So did every court that reviewed the case since.
A mother waited nearly 40 years for this day
Dorthy Tula, Teresa McAbee's mother, spoke after the execution. She did not hold back:
"I waited nearly 40 years to have him dead."
Tula broke down after making the statement. Her daughter's cousin, Tracy Mcfall-Buskirk, was more pointed about the nature of the crime.
"This man took advantage of his badge."
That line cuts to the core of the case. Duckett was not some stranger. He was the uniformed officer patrolling the streets of a small Florida town. An 11-year-old girl trusted the badge enough to get into his car. He used the authority the public gave him to commit the worst crime imaginable against the most vulnerable person he could find.
The fact that it took nearly 40 years for that family to see the sentence carried out is its own indictment, not of the justice system's caution, but of the grinding delays that stretch the suffering of victims' families across decades. Cases involving law enforcement officers charged with murder carry an added weight of betrayed public trust that makes the demand for accountability even sharper.
DNA testing delayed the execution but did not exonerate Duckett
Duckett had been scheduled for execution in March. The Florida Supreme Court issued a stay just before the date to allow DNA testing of old evidence from the case. The results came back inconclusive, they neither exonerated Duckett nor definitively connected him to the crime through that specific testing. Judges allowed the jury's original guilty verdict to stand.
On July 8, the Florida Supreme Court removed the stay. Gov. Ron DeSantis then signed a new death warrant and added Duckett to the execution date already set for Occhicone. Last week, the Florida Supreme Court denied final appeals from both men. Both made last-ditch appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court as well, PBS NewsHour reported.
Duckett's defense team had argued his innocence and claimed DNA evidence was mishandled, Newsmax reported. But the courts found no basis to overturn the conviction. The physical evidence, DNA, hair, fingerprints, and eyewitness testimony placing the girl in Duckett's patrol car, held up across decades of review.
Modern investigative tools like FBI DNA genealogy programs have transformed how cold cases are resolved, but in Duckett's case, the original evidence was strong enough that the conviction survived every challenge without needing new forensic breakthroughs.
DeSantis has overseen executions at a pace unseen since 1976
Tuesday's dual execution was not an isolated event. It was the latest step in a sustained push by DeSantis to clear Florida's death row of inmates convicted of the most serious crimes. Over the past 18 months, the governor has stepped up executions at a pace the state has not seen since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
In 2025 alone, DeSantis oversaw 19 executions, more in a single year than any other Florida governor since reinstatement. The previous high was eight, set in 2014. Since the beginning of 2025, Florida has executed 30 people, while the rest of the states combined have carried out 35.
DeSantis, who leaves office in January, has framed the effort as long-overdue justice for families who have waited decades. In a statement last year, the governor was direct:
"Some of these crimes were committed in the '80s. Justice delayed is justice denied. I felt I owed it to them to make sure this ran very smoothly."
If Occhicone's execution was carried out as scheduled, DeSantis' final two years in office would account for 31 executions, compared to nine during his first six years. Another execution is already set for August.
The last time Florida carried out multiple executions on a single day was May 12, 1964, according to Department of Corrections records. Nationally, Arkansas was the last state to execute two inmates the same day, putting two men to death three hours apart in April 2017. Texas did the same in 2000, the year that state executed 40 prisoners.
Occhicone, 80, would be among the oldest inmates ever executed
The second execution scheduled for Tuesday involved Dominick Anthony Occhicone, convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend's parents in 1986. At 80, Occhicone's attorneys had argued that age-related ailments, including kidney and prostate problems, would make the execution especially painful. The courts rejected those arguments along with the rest of his appeals.
If carried out, Occhicone would not quite be the oldest prisoner put to death in modern U.S. history. That distinction belongs to Walter Moody Jr., who was executed in Alabama in 2018 at age 83 for a wave of mail bombs in 1989 that killed a federal judge and wounded a Black civil rights attorney. But 80 is old enough that the case drew attention from anti-death-penalty advocates.
Grace Hanna, executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, urged DeSantis to halt both executions. She called the dual execution day "an unprecedented escalation of Florida's use of the death penalty" and argued the state "continues to expand the use of capital punishment, despite mounting evidence that it is not what Floridians want." DeSantis, for his part, has not publicly explained why he scheduled two executions six hours apart on the same day.
A Florida prison official said Tuesday morning that the department was confident in its readiness to carry out both executions. The state uses a three-drug protocol: a sedative, a paralytic, and a drug that stops the heart.
Hanna's framing, that the pace of executions reflects something Florida voters oppose, is an assertion, not a proven fact. What is proven is that the crimes in question were monstrous, the convictions were upheld through every level of judicial review, and the families of the victims spent decades waiting for sentences to be carried out. Legislation in states like Ohio, which has moved to strip parole from cop killers, reflects a broader national appetite for holding violent criminals fully accountable.
Seventeen executions nationwide this year, Florida leads by far
Before Tuesday, 17 executions had been carried out across the United States in 2026. Florida was responsible for more than all other states combined. Since the beginning of 2025, the state has carried out nearly half of all state executions nationwide, the Associated Press reported.
Critics will frame that as excess. Families like the McAbees and the Tulas would call it overdue. Duckett sat on death row for nearly four decades while the mother of the girl he killed waited, year after year, for a sentence that was handed down before some of the judges reviewing it were born.
Justice delayed is justice denied. On Tuesday in Starke, Florida, the delay finally ended.
