Florida schedules two lethal injections on Tuesday, including 80-year-old inmate

Florida officials plan to carry out two lethal injections on Tuesday, with former police officer James Aren Duckett, 68, scheduled for noon at the state prison near Starke, followed six hours later by 80-year-old Dominick Anthony Occhicone. Duckett was convicted of raping and drowning an 11-year-old girl in 1987, while Occhicone was sentenced for the 1986 murders of his ex-girlfriend’s parents. Both men had their appeals denied by the Florida Supreme Court last week and still had pending petitions before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The executions would be the 11th and 12th carried out in Florida this year and the first instance of two inmates being executed on the same day in the state since 1964. Governor Ron DeSantis, who is leaving office in January, has overseen 19 executions in 2025, the highest annual total for any Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. If the Tuesday executions proceed, the total for his final two years in office would rise to 31.

Advocacy groups have criticized the schedule. Grace Hanna, executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said the date "represents an unprecedented escalation of Florida’s use of the death penalty" and argued that the state is expanding capital punishment despite public opposition. The governor’s office has not commented on the timing, but DeSantis previously said his goal is to provide closure for victims’ families and that he would not proceed if he believed a defendant were innocent.

Occhicone would become the oldest inmate executed in Florida’s modern history and the second-oldest person executed in the United States since 1976, after an 83-year-old was put to death in Alabama in 2018. The state’s Department of Corrections says executions are performed with a sedative, a paralytic agent and a drug that stops the heart.