Attorneys fighting to prevent two Florida death row inmates from being executed by the state filed a joint lawsuit Friday in federal court.
James Aren Duckett and Dominick Occhicone are scheduled to be executed Tuesday at Florida State Prison near Starke. If the executions take place as scheduled, it would be the first time in 62 years the Sunshine State had executed two individuals on the same day.
The Florida Supreme Court earlier Friday denied Duckett’s motion for a stay of execution and said it would consider no motion for rehearing. Duckett is on death row for the 1987 rape and drowning of 11-year-old Teresa McAbee in 1987. His attorneys have now filed a petition in federal court asking to stop his execution and order additional DNA testing on the victim’s clothing. He is scheduled to be executed Tuesday at noon.
Dominick Occhicone, 80, would be the oldest inmate executed by the state ever (and second oldest in U.S. history) and is scheduled to be executed Tuesday at 6 p.m. for the 1986 murder in Pasco County of Martha Artzner, the mother of his girlfriend. He received a life sentence for the simultaneous murder of Raymond Artzner, the father of his girlfriend.
Attorneys for the two death row inmates argued in a court filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida Friday that their federal constitutional right against cruel and unusual punishment would be violated if the state proceeds with his execution as planned — arguing executing two men on the same day would cause them pain and suffering in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
“By combining Mr. Duckett’s execution day with Mr. Occhicone, 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,” their attorneys write in the filing.
“Additionally, by creating two separate classes of individuals who are treated differently in their execution proceedings, the Defendants have violated the Plaintiff’s right to equal protection. This arbitrary treatment burdens the Plaintiffs’ right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment.”
Executing two men on the same day ‘seems especially callous’
Michael B. Sheedy, executive director of the Florida Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote to Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this week asking for a stay of execution for both men and to commute their sentences to life imprisonment without parole.
If Duckett and Occhicone are executed Tuesday, they would be the 30th and 31st prisoners on Florida’s death row executed since January 2025, and the 10th and 11th executed this year, respectively.
“To punish with lifelong imprisonment is not to minimize the heinousness of these men’s crimes. It is rather to recognize with awe that God is the author of life, and to reserve to him the taking of human life except where it is otherwise impossible to maintain the common good,” Sheedy wrote. “Moreover, requiring state officers to kill two men on the same day seems especially callous.”
“These are very different cases but it all comes to this same reality that Florida continues to expand the use of capital punishment practically and legislatively despite mounting evidence that this is not what Floridians want,” said Grace Hanna, executive director of Floridians For Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
“Last year there were five new death sentences handed down in Florida. In 2011, 14 people were sentenced to death. So juries are moving away from the death penalty and aren’t seeing it as necessary even though our state leaders are accelerating executions.”
Florida leads the country in exonerations of people sentenced to death with 30. Attorneys and advocates for Duckett maintain there are too many questions regarding his guilt to execute him.
Duckett, a former police officer from the city of Mascotte in Lake County, has maintained his innocence since the day he was arrested in the killing of Teresa McAbee. The jury that convicted him in 1990 was split about the case, finding him guilty on an 8-4 vote.
Duckett’s attorneys say the case against him has been based entirely on circumstantial evidence and that several pieces of evidence have since come under doubt.
The only witness who claimed to have seen the victim leave in Duckett’s car was then-16-year-old Grace Gwendolyn Gurley. She did not come forward until five months after the crime. She later recounted her testimony in a sworn statement to Duckett’s death row appeal team.
But in 1997, when she was brought before a court, she refused to say whether she lied when she testified that she saw the victim in Duckett’s car, as reported by the Orlando Sentinel.
Other witnesses testified in that same court hearing that she’d been coached by sheriff’s investigators to accuse Duckett of the crime by memorizing a script in return for preferential treatment at the Lake County Jail.
The prosecution also relied on forensic evidence from an FBI analyst.
DNA testing
Duckett’s attorneys requested DNA testing for years regarding the biological material found on the victim’s clothing. Some items were tested and yielded no results. But after DeSantis signed a warrant for him to be executed on March 31, a judge did grant his attorneys’ request for DNA testing.
The results were deemed inconclusive. Duckett’s attorneys argued the testing should have been conducted by a lab in Texas that uses a method known as whole genome sequencing, which they said would be more likely to extract usable results.
The state objected to testing in Texas, insisting on keeping the sample in Florida. It was “consumed” or destroyed in the testing process.
