(Florida Prison. Photo by ABC News)
Florida is poised to become the first US state in almost a decade to carry out two executions in a single day, with lethal injections scheduled for Tuesday involving a former police officer convicted of murdering a young girl and an octogenarian who would become the second-oldest inmate executed in modern American history.
The dual executions come roughly 18 months after Republican Governor Ron DeSantis began ramping up the pace of executions in Florida to levels unseen in recent times.
DeSantis has not explained why the two executions were scheduled six hours apart, and prison officials have not indicated whether the timing poses any logistical difficulties for staff.
James Aren Duckett, 68, is set to die by lethal injection at noon at Florida State Prison near Starke, with 80-year-old Dominick Anthony Occhicone scheduled to follow later that day.
Occhicone would become the oldest prisoner ever executed in Florida’s modern history.
Duckett was convicted of raping and drowning an 11-year-old girl while serving as a police officer in a small central Florida city in 1987, while Occhicone was convicted over the 1986 killings of his ex-girlfriend’s parents.
If carried out, the executions would make the two men 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 another stay, arguing that he is innocent and blaming the state’s handling of DNA evidence for inconclusive results, while Occhicone’s attorneys contended that age-related health conditions, including kidney and prostate problems, could make his execution unusually painful and amount to cruel and unusual punishment.
Both men still had pending appeals before the US Supreme Court.
DeSantis, who is due to leave office in January, presided over a record 19 executions in 2025, the highest number carried out under any Florida governor in a single year since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1976, surpassing the previous record of eight set in 2014.
Should Tuesday’s executions go ahead, the total for DeSantis’ final two years in office would reach 31, compared with just nine during his first six years as governor.
With another execution already scheduled for August, 2026 could also set a new record.
DeSantis had initially signed a death warrant for Duckett in February, setting an execution date of March 31, but the Florida Supreme Court granted a stay days before that date to allow DNA testing on old evidence that could not be analysed at the time of the original trial due to technological limitations.
The results proved inconclusive, neither clearing Duckett nor conclusively tying him to the crime, and judges allowed the original verdict to stand.
Occhicone’s death warrant, signed late last month, had initially been the only execution scheduled for Tuesday.
However, after the Florida Supreme Court lifted Duckett’s stay on July 8, DeSantis signed a fresh warrant for him and added his execution to the same date something that had not happened in Florida in more than six decades.
State corrections records show that multiple executions on a single day were more common in the past, with the most recent instance prior to this having occurred on May 12, 1964.
While it is not unusual for two different states to carry out executions on the same date, a single state executing two people on one day is far rarer.
The last state to do so before Florida was Arkansas in April 2017, while Texas executed two convicted killers on the same day in 2000, during a year in which it carried out 40 executions in total.
An advocacy group opposing the death penalty, Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, has called on DeSantis to halt both executions.
Its executive director described the scheduling of both cases on the same day as an unprecedented escalation in the state’s use of capital punishment, noting that although the two cases differ significantly, they reflect a broader pattern of expanding executions despite growing evidence that this is not what most Floridians support.
The governor’s office has largely refrained from commenting on individual executions over the past year and a half.
DeSantis has previously said his objective is to deliver justice to victims’ families who have waited decades for death sentences to be carried out, noting at a news conference in November 2025 that some of the crimes dated back to the 1980s and that he felt obligated to ensure the process moved forward smoothly, adding that he would not proceed if he genuinely believed someone was innocent.
Occhicone is set to become Florida’s oldest executed inmate, just weeks after two 74-year-old men briefly held that distinction in succession.
The recent string of executions has drawn attention to the aging population on death row nationwide and reignited debate over the ethics of executing inmates who may otherwise die of natural causes in the near future.
Occhicone would also become the second-oldest person known to have been executed in modern US history, behind 83-year-old Walter Moody Jr., who was put to death in Alabama in 2018 for a series of mail bombings in 1989 that killed a federal judge and injured a Black civil rights attorney.
Executions in Florida are carried out using a three-drug lethal injection protocol involving a sedative, a paralytic agent, and a drug that stops the heart.