Florida put convicted child killer James Duckett to death Tuesday afternoon and scheduled a second lethal injection hours later, the first time the state has executed two inmates in one day since 1964.
Duckett, 68, a former police officer convicted of raping and drowning 11-year-old Teresa McAbee in 1987, was pronounced dead at 1:19 p.m. at Florida State Prison near Starke after a three-drug lethal injection. When the warden shook him and shouted his name roughly four minutes after the drugs began flowing, Duckett did not respond. Asked beforehand whether he wanted to make a final statement, he answered simply, "No sir."
He offered no word of remorse for the girl whose body was pulled from a lake nearly 40 years ago. He offered nothing at all.
On the evening of May 11, 1987, Duckett was the sole police officer on duty in Mascotte, a small town near Orlando. Witnesses told investigators they saw Teresa McAbee climb into his patrol car. Hours later, her mother reported the girl missing. The next morning, Teresa's body was found in a nearby lake. She had been raped and drowned.
Duckett was convicted that same year. He spent nearly four decades on death row, longer than Teresa McAbee was alive. His attorney, Mary Elizabeth Wells, maintained throughout that her client was innocent. After the execution was rescheduled, Wells called the state's handling of the case shameful:
"Mr. Duckett has consistently maintained his innocence."
Wells also argued the state had rushed the process. "The State's duty is to ensure that justice is done, and not rush to kill in a case with such serious doubts over guilt," she said. But the courts disagreed, repeatedly.
Teresa McAbee's family saw it differently. Her mother, Dorthy Tula, told reporters after the execution: "I waited nearly 40 years to have him dead." Tracy Mcfall-Buskirk, Teresa's cousin, put it more bluntly: "This man took advantage of his badge."
Those are the words of a family that lived with the consequences of Duckett's crime for decades while the legal system ground forward. For them, Tuesday's execution was not a rush. It was overdue.
Governor Ron DeSantis signed Duckett's death warrant in February. The execution was originally set for March 31. Days before that date, the Florida Supreme Court issued a stay to allow DNA testing that had not been possible at the time of the original trial due to technological limitations.
The results came back inconclusive. The court lifted the stay earlier this month, and the execution was rescheduled for Tuesday. Last-minute appeals reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied them.
DeSantis, who has overseen an aggressive execution schedule, defended the state's approach:
"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 I honestly thought someone was innocent, I would not pull the trigger."
That framing, that decades of delay themselves represent a failure of justice, resonates with the families of victims in capital cases. In other recent death penalty cases, families have waited years just to see a sentence handed down, let alone carried out.
Duckett became the 11th inmate executed by Florida in 2025, a pace that accounts for nearly half of all state executions carried out in the country this year. No other state comes close.
The last state to carry out two executions in a single day was Arkansas, which put two inmates to death on April 24, 2017. Florida had not done it since 1964. Tuesday's double execution marks a clear escalation, and a signal that the DeSantis administration intends to work through the state's backlog of death row cases.
The Supreme Court's role in death penalty appeals remains a recurring flashpoint. In Duckett's case, the justices declined to intervene. The legal process had run its course.
Hours after Duckett was pronounced dead, 80-year-old Dominick Occhicone was scheduled for lethal injection at 6 p.m. in the same facility. Occhicone was convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend's parents in 1986, another crime from the same era, another sentence that sat on the books for decades.
If carried out, Occhicone's execution would make him the oldest death row inmate ever put to death in Florida and the second oldest prisoner known to have been executed in modern U.S. history. The record belongs to Walter Moody Jr., who was 83 when Alabama executed him in 2018 for a 1989 mail bomb campaign that killed a federal judge and a civil rights attorney.
Florida has already set its own age records this year. Earlier this month, Dennis Sochor became the oldest inmate executed in the state after being put to death for killing a woman he met on New Year's Eve 1981. In June, Dusty Ray Spencer was executed at 74, one week younger than Sochor at the time of his death.
The pattern is plain. Florida's death row houses inmates convicted decades ago, many now elderly, whose sentences were never carried out. The state is now moving through that list. Whether one views that as long-overdue accountability or a troubling acceleration depends on where one stands, but the families of the victims have made their position clear.
Capital punishment remains one of the sharpest divides in American law. Some states have moved away from the death penalty entirely, opting for life sentences even in cases involving the murder of public officials. Florida is moving in the opposite direction.
The Florida Supreme Court's decision to grant a stay before the original March 31 execution date was not a small thing. The court recognized that DNA testing technology unavailable at the time of Duckett's 1987 trial might shed new light on the evidence. It ordered the testing.
The results were inconclusive. They did not exonerate Duckett. They did not further implicate him. Wells, his attorney, blamed the state's handling of the evidence for the ambiguous outcome and argued the case still carried "serious doubts over guilt." But the court found the results insufficient to block the execution and lifted the stay.
Duckett's case is not the only one in which courts have wrestled with evolving standards in death penalty proceedings. The legal system regularly confronts questions about what new evidence or new science means for old convictions. In this case, the answer was that inconclusive results do not overturn a jury's verdict.
For critics of capital punishment, that answer will never be satisfying. For the family of Teresa McAbee, the 11-year-old girl who climbed into a patrol car and never came home, 40 years of waiting was answer enough.
Cases involving law enforcement officers who betray their oath carry a particular sting. Duckett wore a badge. He was the only officer on duty that night. The witnesses saw the girl get into his car. The system convicted him, and after nearly four decades, the system carried out the sentence.
When the state finally asks a condemned man if he has anything to say, and he says nothing, the silence speaks for itself.
