James Duckett was never supposed to be the 11th name on Florida's execution list this year — he was slated to be the third. But a stay, a round of inconclusive DNA testing, and months of legal wrangling pushed his case down a winding road that finally ended Tuesday, July 28, just hours before another condemned man, Dominick Occhicone, was set to follow him to the death chamber.

Duckett's time of death was recorded at 1:19 p.m. The clock had already ticked past noon — his originally scheduled hour — when the U.S. Supreme Court still hadn't ruled on his final request for a stay, leaving his fate suspended in legal limbo until the very end.

The Crime That Sparked a 40-Year Battle

Duckett, 68, spent nearly four decades insisting he didn't do it. A former Mascotte police officer, he was convicted of kidnapping, sexually assaulting and killing 11-year-old Teresa Mae McAbee — a girl prosecutors said he snatched from a convenience store where she'd only gone to grab a pencil. What should have been an errand ended with her body pulled from a lake the next day, strangled and drowned.

DNA Testing That Raised More Questions Than Answers

Just days before his execution was originally set for March, the Florida Supreme Court hit pause, ordering further DNA testing that seemed to offer Duckett one last lifeline. But the results came back inconclusive — neither clearing him nor sealing his fate — and his renewed appeal was rejected. Gov. Ron DeSantis wasted little time signing a fresh death warrant.

The U.S. Supreme Court delivered its final blow roughly 30 minutes after his execution had already been set into motion, denying his last appeal almost as an afterthought. His attorneys didn't go quietly, accusing Florida's court system of steering a decades-old semen sample from the victim's underwear toward a Florida lab built for speed rather than a facility equipped for the whole-genome sequencing such an old sample demanded. The sample, they said, was entirely consumed in testing — leaving no material for a second opinion — and communication between Duckett's legal team and the lab was cut off like a phone line gone dead.

The Florida Supreme Court wasn't moved, denying Duckett's bid to test additional evidence on the grounds that the clock had simply run out.

A Rare Double Execution Raises Alarm

Duckett's death, paired with Occhicone's — convicted in the 1986 murders of his ex-fiancée's parents — marked Florida's first double execution in 62 years, a grim milestone that hadn't been reached in more than six decades. Both men joined forces in a last-ditch legal maneuver, filing a joint emergency motion with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, warning that scheduling two executions just six hours apart raised the odds of a catastrophic misstep.

"By combining Mr. Duckett's execution day with Mr. Occhionne's, the risk of a botched execution is exponentially increased due to factors including the impact of the prison and execution teams not being prepared to conduct two executions on the same day and the risk of errors with the lethal injection drugs," the July 23 filing argued — a warning that framed the state's schedule as a recipe for disaster rather than routine procedure.

Two Executions, One Day

Florida carried out Duckett's execution by lethal injection starting at noon Eastern time at Florida State Prison in Raiford, roughly 40 miles west of Jacksonville. Occhicone's was scheduled to follow at 6 p.m. the same day — a same-day sequence unlike anything the state had attempted in generations.

The Night That Changed Everything

Rewind to May 11, 1987: James Aren Duckett, then just 29, was working a solo patrol shift in the small town of Mascotte, in Lake County, when prosecutors say he crossed paths with McAbee as she left a convenience store alongside a 16-year-old boy.

Duckett's version of events was simple — he claimed he drove her to his patrol car and sent her on her way home. But witnesses, including the teenage boy and his uncle, told a different story, one where Duckett drove off with the girl still in his car.

A Missing Persons Report With a Twist

When McAbee never made it home, her mother alerted police — and in an unsettling twist, it was Duckett himself who filed the missing persons report for the girl he's accused of killing. The next day, a fisherman discovered her body near the shore of Knight Lake, less than a mile from where she'd last been seen. Investigators determined she'd been sexually assaulted, strangled and drowned.

The Evidence That Sealed His Fate

Investigators zeroed in on tire tracks at the scene that matched the tread of Mascotte's two patrol cars — Duckett's included. Palm prints lifted from the hood of his cruiser matched McAbee's, and an FBI special agent linked a pubic hair recovered from her underwear directly to Duckett, evidence that would become the backbone of the state's case.

Duckett denied ever driving to the lake or taking the girl anywhere near it. His attorneys pushed back just as hard, noting there was no mud, no blood, nothing incriminating found in or on his car — and that witnesses who saw him after midnight described him as clean and unruffled, hardly the picture of a man who'd just committed a violent crime.

Testimony From Other Women Colored the Trial

Prosecutors bolstered their case with testimony from three young women who said they'd had sexual encounters with Duckett in the five months before McAbee's death. Two described unwanted advances; the third described an encounter that occurred while Duckett was on duty — details that painted a portrait jurors would ultimately weigh heavily against him.

Duckett was convicted of first-degree murder and sexual battery, receiving a death sentence for the murder and a consecutive life sentence — with no parole eligibility for 25 years — for the assault charge.

Doubts That Lingered for Decades

Over the years behind bars, cracks began to show in the case against him. Questions surfaced about the reliability of eyewitness accounts, the validity of the pubic hair analysis, and other elements of the original investigation — enough to fuel repeated appeals to the Florida Supreme Court. Each one, however, was turned away, leaving Duckett's claims of innocence unresolved until the very moment his execution was carried out.