Florida did something Tuesday it had not done since 1964: it carried out two executions on the same day.

James Aren Duckett, 68, and Dominick Anthony Occhicone, 80, were put to death nearly five hours apart inside the same execution chamber at Florida State Prison.

Both men had spent roughly four decades behind bars for crimes that shattered three families.

The first execution involved one of the most horrifying abuses of a police badge imaginable. The second closed a case that began with the murders of an elderly couple inside their own home.

This video lays out the cases and shows the families at the center of Tuesday’s historic day:

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Duckett was working as the only police officer on duty in Mascotte on the night 11-year-old Teresa McAbee disappeared from a convenience store in May 1987.

Witnesses saw Teresa get into Duckett’s patrol car. Her body was found the next morning in a nearby lake.

Investigators recovered fingerprints matching Teresa and Duckett from the patrol car. Hair and biological evidence collected from Teresa’s body were also presented against him at trial.

Duckett was convicted of raping and drowning the child. He maintained his innocence until the end and declined to make a final statement before he was pronounced dead at 1:19 p.m.

After the execution, Teresa’s mother reduced nearly four decades of grief and waiting to nine words: “I waited nearly 40 years to have him dead.”

The Associated Press reported that Duckett became the 11th person executed by Florida this year. Occhicone followed in the same chamber and was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m., making him the oldest known prisoner executed in Florida’s modern record-keeping history and the second-oldest person put to death anywhere in the United States during the modern era.

Occhicone was convicted of murdering Raymond and Martha Artzner in June 1986. Authorities said he went to their home looking for his former girlfriend, left after she refused to speak with him, returned with a handgun, cut the telephone lines, and shot both parents as the woman escaped with her daughter.

Before the lethal injection began, Occhicone thanked the Christian men who had visited him in prison and apologized to the victims’ family and his own. The Artzner children later said the execution ended a long and painful chapter, but did not erase the missing chairs, lost conversations, and suffering their family had carried since 1986.

The numbers show how sharply Florida has accelerated the use of capital punishment. Tuesday’s executions brought the state’s 2026 total to 12 — more than every other state combined at that point — after Florida carried out a record 19 executions in 2025.

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USA TODAY also confirmed the identities of both men and the crimes that placed them on death row:

The road to Tuesday’s double execution was not automatic, especially in Duckett’s case.

The Florida Supreme Court stayed Duckett’s first execution date just before he was scheduled to die in March. The justices ordered testing of old DNA evidence that could not be evaluated with the technology available at the time of his 1988 trial.

That testing came back inconclusive. It neither exonerated Duckett nor definitively tied him to the crime, and the courts left the jury’s verdict intact.

The Florida Supreme Court lifted the stay in July, clearing the way for Governor Ron DeSantis to sign a new death warrant.

The state court also rejected Occhicone’s final challenge in the week before his execution. Attorneys had raised his age, serious health problems, and other claims, but the court declined to halt the sentence imposed for the Artzner murders.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied the last appeals from both men on Tuesday. With those rulings, no court order remained between the signed death warrants and the two lethal injections.

The Florida Department of Corrections historical records show that Emmett Blake and Sie Dawson were the last two people executed by Florida on the same date. Both men were put to death on May 12, 1964, when the electric chair was still the state’s method of execution.

Florida carried out multiple executions on a single day more often in earlier decades, but the practice disappeared before the modern death-penalty era began.

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Tuesday’s schedule broke a gap of more than six decades.

The department’s modern execution records place Duckett and Occhicone at numbers 11 and 12 for 2026. Their executions were administered by a three-drug lethal-injection protocol involving a sedative, a paralytic, and a drug that stops the heart.

Another Florida execution is already scheduled for August, and DeSantis has made clear that old cases will not be allowed to fade simply because decades have passed. His position has been blunt: justice delayed is justice denied, especially for families that have spent most of their lives waiting for a lawful sentence to be carried out.

There will always be fierce disagreement over capital punishment, and no execution can restore Teresa McAbee, Raymond Artzner, or Martha Artzner to the people who loved them.

But Florida’s action on Tuesday sent an unmistakable message: the age of a case does not erase the victims, and the passage of time does not cancel a final judgment.

This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

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