Florida put two men to death by lethal injection on Tuesday, July 28, 2026, at Florida State Prison near Starke — the first time any U.S. state carried out two executions in a single day in nearly a decade. James Aren Duckett, 68, was pronounced dead at 1:19 p.m. Dominick Anthony Occhicone, 80, followed at 6:13 p.m. Both died by three-drug lethal injection in the same death chamber, nearly five hours apart. (WFLA; The Guardian)

Governor Ron DeSantis decided earlier in July to schedule both executions on the same day. He signed Duckett's death warrant on February 27, 2026, originally setting the execution for March 31 at 6:00 p.m. He signed Occhicone's warrant on June 26, scheduling it for July 28 at 6:00 p.m. The convergence was deliberate, not a calendrical accident. (Florida Courts docket)

The last time a state executed two inmates in one day was in Arkansas in 2017, when two men were put to death three hours apart. Florida had not carried out a same-day double execution in 60 years. (AP News; The Guardian)

Duckett, a former police officer, was convicted of raping and drowning 11-year-old Teresa McAbee in 1987. His attorneys maintained his innocence and challenged the state's handling of DNA evidence. Duckett filed a motion for DNA testing on March 5, 2026, more than four months before the Florida Supreme Court noted he was aware of the items he sought to test. The court declined to intervene the previous week, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied his last-ditch appeal on July 28. Duckett declined to make a final statement. (Florida Supreme Court opinion; The Guardian)

Occhicone was convicted in 1986 of killing his ex-girlfriend's parents. After his death warrant was signed on June 26, he filed a second successive motion for postconviction relief, which was ultimately denied. The Florida Supreme Court declined to intervene, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied his final appeal on July 28. In his last words, Occhicone apologized to the victims' family and his own, saying: "I never meant to do what I did." (The Guardian)

At 80, Occhicone was the oldest prisoner executed in Florida's history since modern record-keeping began a century ago. He was the second-oldest inmate known to receive a lethal injection in modern U.S. history, behind Walter Moody Jr., who was 83 when Alabama executed him in 2018 for a wave of mail bombs in 1989.

After Duckett's execution, Teresa McAbee's mother, Dorthy Tula, and cousin, Tracy Mcfall-Buskirk, addressed witnesses. Tula said she "waited nearly 40 years to have him dead." (The Guardian)

The double execution fits a broader pattern. Since the start of 2025, Florida has carried out nearly half of all state executions across the United States. As of July 28, before the two lethal injections, 17 executions had been conducted nationwide in 2026, with Florida accounting for more than all other states combined. After Tuesday, that margin widened further.

Looking at what this means for capital punishment policy, DeSantis's decision to stack two executions on a single day signals an intent to accelerate the pace of executions in Florida beyond its already elevated baseline. The governor has sole authority in Florida to sign death warrants and set execution dates, and the scheduling choice — placing an 80-year-old and a 68-year-old in the same chamber hours apart — was a discretionary act with no procedural necessity driving it.

The legal pathways for both men also closed in parallel. Both had appeals denied by the U.S. Supreme Court on the day of execution, after the Florida Supreme Court declined to intervene the prior week. Duckett's innocence claim and DNA-evidence challenge, and Occhicone's second successive postconviction motion, were each rejected without relief. The speed of the final denials — same-day rulings from the high court — reflects the well-established precedent that last-minute appeals rarely halt executions once a death warrant is active.

Florida's dominance of the national execution count raises the question of whether other states will follow its approach. Arkansas's 2017 double execution was driven by drug-expiration concerns — a practical constraint, not a policy preference. Florida's 2026 double execution had no such cited rationale. The state's three-drug protocol proceeded without reported complication for either inmate.

For practitioners tracking Eighth Amendment litigation, the advanced ages of both executed inmates — and Occhicone's place in the historical record — add to a small but growing set of cases where courts have declined to treat advanced age or decades-long incarceration as bars to execution. Neither man's legal team made age a central pillar of final appeals, but the demographic trajectory is consistent with a death row population that has aged substantially since the peak sentencing years of the 1980s and 1990s.