RAIFORD, Fla. — Double murderer Dominick Occhicone was executed by lethal injection Tuesday evening at Florida State Prison, the state’s 12th execution this year — and the second since noon. 

It was a morbid milestone for Florida, which has executed more prisoners this year than 49 other states combined. It had been six decades since Florida had executed two Death Row convicts back to back. 

Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose tough-on-crime bona fides were burnished by last year’s record spree of 19 executions, is on track to exceed that benchmark.

Occhicone, one month short of 81, became the oldest person to be executed by the state. 

He was convicted of the June 1986 murders of Raymond and Martha Artzner, whom he blamed for breaking up his relationship with his girlfriend, their daughter. Occhicone shot the couple inside their house in the town of Holiday. 

Occhicone’s execution, scheduled for 6 p.m., started almost precisely on time with the parting of a curtain, revealing a gurney to which he was lashed. Asked if he had any last words, the condemned man — facing the ceiling, cloaked beneath a white sheet, his hands immobilized — said: “I know it don’t mean much, but I never meant to do what I did.”

Then he apologized to his family and the family of the victims, and thanked his lawyers.

After Occhicone’s death was announced by the unidentified execution warden at 6:13 p.m., the relatives of his victims issued a written statement: “The years since June 10, 1986, have been filled with sleepless nights, empty chairs at family gatherings, and those one-on-one conversations that were lost.”

“Today does not erase that pain, and it does not undo the harm, but it does close a door and end a chapter in our lives that has just lingered on far too long.”

At a vigil on the lawn outside the prison, Catholic Bishop William Wack questioned the humanity of capital punishment in general, and in particular scheduling two in one day. 

“Is this really how we alleviate violence?” he asked. He and others had signed and sent a letter to the governor, requesting that the executions be halted. 

Occhicone’s execution followed that of James Duckett, 68, whose death was delayed by approximately one hour as the U.S. Supreme Court weighed his request for a stay. The high court chose not to intervene.

A former police officer in Mascotte, Florida, Duckett was convicted of the May 1987 kidnapping, rape, and murder of 11-year-old Teresa Mae McAbee, whose lifeless body was discarded beside a lake.  

Occhicone’s execution, employing Florida’s three-drug lethal cocktail, mirrored that of Duckett’s hours earlier. In Duckett’s case, the ritual was witnessed by 24 of the victim’s relatives, including her mother.

After Duckett’s plea for more time was denied, a curtain parted in the death chamber and, lashed to a gurney, he was asked if he had any last words.

“No, sir,” he responded.

With that, the first lethal dose was injected into his veins. A roomful of witnesses — including Teresa’s mother Dorothy Tula, who uses a wheelchair — watched silently. A priest prayed. Minutes passed.

When Duckett was motionless and appeared to have stopped breathing, the execution warden touched the man’s eyelid, shook his shoulder, and uttered “Mr. Duckett” twice. There was no response.

At 1:18 p.m., a physician emerged from a back room, touched Duckett’s neck with two fingers, placed a stethoscope to his chest, and flashed a penlight in Duckett’s eyes. Duckett was declared dead.

At a news briefing afterward, Tula and her sister, Shirley Lancaster, spoke solemnly about Teresa and the man who stole her life.

“The state let him live too damn long,” Lancaster said. “Maybe she would have been the next doctor or the next president. But we never got to know.”

The same doctor and warden oversaw both executions.

The last time two people were executed on the same day in Florida was in May 1964, when two men were electrocuted in the same chair. 

Florida’s 12 executions in 2026 is three times the current tally in Texas, six times that of Alabama, and 12 times the total in South Carolina, collectively the only other states to have carried out executions this year.

DeSantis has already signed his 13th death warrant, with the execution scheduled to take place in less than three weeks. 

The double execution was scheduled after the denial of a series of court petitions alleging violations of the Eighth Amendment barring cruel and unusual punishment. One petition argued that scheduling the executions back to back made it impossible to review whether complications with the first could merit a rescheduling of the second. That appeal for a delay was dismissed within a day.

“The Court sees nothing irrational about the State wanting to conduct multiple executions on the same day for the sake of convenience and efficiency,” a U.S. district court in Tallahassee found.

Separate claims that added stress on the execution team could result in errors were “nothing more than conjecture and speculation,” the court stated.

The “speculative harm” suffered by the two men being put to death within a day, the court added, is “far outweighed by the interest of the State and the public in administering long-overdue justice.”

Florida’s execution protocols — last reviewed by Ricky Dixon, then-corrections secretary, in 2025 — don’t explicitly account for such a scenario.

Florida Department of Corrections policies lay out the schedule for a condemned prisoner on his or her last day. On the morning of the execution, between 8 and 10, family members and friends are allowed to visit. Then, between noon and 2 p.m., the condemned prisoner can meet with a spiritual advisor. Scheduling two executions in one day necessitated a change. 

Duckett’s final family visit was conducted Monday, although he was scheduled to meet his spiritual advisor between 6 and 8 a.m. on Tuesday. 

Grace Hanna, executive director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, called Tuesday an “unprecedented escalation of Florida’s use of the death penalty.”

Jordan Kirkland, spokesman for the Department of Corrections, said: “DOC doesn’t schedule. We carry out the sentence of the court.”

The accelerated rate of executions comes despite documented issues in at least half of Florida’s executions last year. 

A February 2026 investigation by The Florida Trib and Mother Jones found issues, based on the Department of Corrections’ own drug logs, ranging from the use of expired and unprescribed drugs to underdosings. Eyewitness testimonies described men strapped on the gurney who appeared to be heaving, with one falling off the steel bed, and another whose eyes rolled back in his head.

Autopsy reports of those executed showed signs of pulmonary edema — a condition described by an anesthesiologist as causing “the terror that accompanies drowning and asphyxiation as they choke on their own blood.”  

None of those issues have prompted a reevaluation of how the state carries out the death penalty. 

“If this works for him, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next time he does three executions in one day,” Ron McAndrew, a former Florida warden, said of Gov. DeSantis. McAndrew oversaw Florida’s executions from 1996 to 1998, including three by the electric chair. 

McAndrew was in charge in 1997 when the chair malfunctioned, causing the head of a condemned man, Pedro Medina, to burst into flames. 

“I had a man that was on fire — burning to death — and I couldn’t stop it,” said McAndrew, now a corrections consultant. “I had a warrant that said I was required to kill this man. No questions asked.” 

In April 2014, Oklahoma faced a similar malfunction. The execution of Clayton Lockett went awry when the execution team struggled to find IV access to administer the lethal drugs, halting the execution midway. A second execution scheduled two hours later was postponed. 

Lockett would die of a heart attack 43 hours after the botched procedure. 

Lockett’s case led to a state-level investigation, which determined that executions should be spaced at least seven days apart. Conducting two executions on the same day created “extra stress” for the warden, medical personnel, and execution team, it found. “The paramedic stated he/she felt stress and a sense of urgency in the air,” the investigation found. 

By 2024, a court in Oklahoma granted a request — by the state director of corrections, backed by the state’s attorney general — for executions to have approximately a 90-day gap between them. 

Other states that conduct executions have passed similar requirements. 

A 2024 petition filed by five South Carolina Death Row inmates stated: “Scheduling executions close in time to one another heightens the risk of serious error during the execution, likely resulting in cruel or unusual punishment.” 

A court concurred, and the state enacted a 35-day minimum gap between executions.

In Missouri, there can be only one execution per month.

Late Tuesday, speaking to the Florida Sheriffs Association, Gov. DeSantis said, “I don’t take any joy” in presiding over executions, but that it is part of his responsibilities as governor,

He said executions “got off schedule” during COVID, adding “some of the victims’ families have been waiting a long time. And some of them are just like, you know, when are we going to get justice?”

He acknowledged it is likely that by year’s end, his administration will have surpassed any other Florida administration’s execution numbers.

Oishika Neogi is special correspondent for The Florida Trib who writes about the death penalty and is working on a grant-funded project about in-custody deaths. She is a New York-based investigative reporter covering the criminal justice system, prisons and other social issues. Formerly a fellow with Columbia Journalism Investigations, her work has appeared in outlets such as NBC News, New York Focus, Forbidden Stories, and Al Jazeera.