There are governors who oversee executions and there is Ron DeSantis, who has made Florida’s death chamber the busiest in the country, oversaw a record 19 executions in 2025, and on Tuesday executed two people in the same chamber five hours apart, making Florida the first state in a decade to put more than one person to death on a single day, all while repeatedly telling the families of victims that they had waited too long for justice, which they had, and which is also not the only thing worth saying about what happened on Tuesday.
Dominick Anthony Occhicone, 80, was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on Tuesday afternoon, making him the oldest person executed in Florida’s recorded history. James Aren Duckett, 68, a former police officer convicted of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl in 1987, was executed in the same chamber five hours earlier, having spent decades on death row exhausting appeals that included a DNA test that came back inconclusive. Both are dead. Florida carried out both executions on the same Tuesday, which no state has done since Texas in 2015, and which Florida did because DeSantis signed both warrants and declined to intervene when the courts did not stop either.
Since 2025 began, Florida has carried out nearly half of all state executions in the entire country, per The Guardian’s reporting confirmed by Raw Story today. This is one state. It contains roughly 6 percent of the US population. It is responsible for approximately 50 percent of the country’s executions. The use of the death penalty had been declining nationally for two decades before DeSantis decided the trend was in the wrong direction and reversed it. He is in his final term as governor. He has been using it.
DeSantis said too many families have waited too long to see justice. The families of Teresa McAbee, the 11-year-old Duckett killed in 1987, have waited 39 years. The families of Occhicone’s victims have waited 46 years. The governor is correct that they have waited. The question of whether killing an 80-year-old man who has spent 46 years in prison constitutes justice, or whether it constitutes something the word justice is being stretched to cover, is one that Florida’s death warrant process does not require anyone to answer.
Nationwide, the use of the death penalty had been declining. That number has ticked up. Florida is why.
When one state accounts for nearly half of all US executions and executes two people in one day because the governor says families have waited too long, what exactly is the justice system producing?
Sources
Raw Story: Red state notches dubious record as governor pushes for families to ‘see justice’
