To the extent they can be, state executions should be solemn, marking the gravity of the moment when the state takes the life of one of its citizens. Last meals, last words and the presence of spiritual advisers are all meant to mark such solemnity, to lend a touch of dignity to an otherwise dehumanizing process.
That is one very good reason that executions should also be meticulously planned and spaced apart appropriately. But what Florida plans to do on Tuesday will be anything but solemn or dignified: to carry out two executions in a single day at the state prison in Raiford. If the state goes through with its plan, it will be only the 12th time in the past half-century when a state has carried out more than one execution in a single day. Even for Florida, whose Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, seems eager to sign as many death warrants as he can before his term runs out, a double execution will be an unseemly spectacle.
What Florida plans to do on Tuesday will be anything but solemn or dignified: to carry out two executions in a single day at the state prison in Raiford.
Scheduled six hours apart, the executions will be difficult for Florida to carry out without error, and will put an enormous strain on the correctional staff who will have to carry them out. And the cases of the two people scheduled to die on Tuesday, James Duckett and Dominick Occhicone, will shine a harsh light on the death penalty’s many injustices and excesses.
Duckett, who was convicted of the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl, maintains his innocence, and there is no conclusive physical evidence linking him to the crime. The jury in his case could not reach a unanimous verdict on the right sentence, but under Florida’s unusual state law, it only took 8 out of the 12 jurors to sentence him to death. As the Death Penalty Information Center notes, “In no other U.S. state would Mr. Duckett have been sentenced to death by just 8 jurors.”
Occhicone, 80, was convicted in 1987 of committing a double murder and sentenced on the basis of a 7-5 jury vote. Such a vote would no longer be enough to send someone to death row. In 2017, the legislature passed a law requiring jury unanimity in death cases, only to change its mind in 2023, when it said that only eight votes would be enough.
It did so at DeSantis’ urging.
DeSantis “oversaw a record 19 executions in 2025, more in a single year than any other Florida governor since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976,” The Associated Press reported. The state has already put 10 people to death this year.
DeSantis explains Florida’s accelerated pace of execution as a way to bring closure to victims’ families and by invoking the maxim “justice delayed is justice denied.”
Historically, executing more than one person in a day was fairly common. The last time Florida executed two people in one day was on May 12, 1964, when Emmett C. Blake and Sie Dawson were electrocuted within hours of each other. Going back further, the state has executed as many as four people in one day on four different occasions, two times in 1936 and once in 1941 and 1942.
The most executions carried out on a single day in this country occurred on Dec. 26, 1862, “when thirty-eight members of the Dakota tribe were executed by the federal government in a mass hanging in Minnesota,” according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Other examples include what Texas did in 1924, when it executed five people on the same day, while in February 1951, Virginia put four men to death on a single day and killed three more three days later.
Also in 1951, New York executed Martha Beck and Raymond Martinez Fernandez, one after the other. The couple had been dubbed the “Lonely Hearts Killers” after they murdered several women they met through newspaper personal ads.
In the 1990s, Arkansas executed three people on the same day on two separate occasions, one in 1994, one in 1997. Three years later, on Aug. 9, 2000, Texas put two people to death by lethal injection.
Jim Willett, the warden who presided over the Texas executions, says, “I don’t remember any problems … I’m not trying to make light of it, but if you can do it right once, why can’t you do it twice the same day?”
Fourteen years later, when Oklahoma tried to carry out a double execution, it marked a return to the practice seen in other states. But it found out that things are not that easy. An NBC News affiliate in Dallas explained that the “attempt to execute two inmates on the same April day was thwarted after the first prisoner (Clayton Lockett) writhed and moaned on the gurney in a lethal injection the corrections chief tried to halt before the inmate’s death 43 minutes later.”
The execution of Charles Warner, who was scheduled to be put to death on the same gurney just two hours later, did not proceed. An investigation found that in Lockett’s execution, “intravenous lines had been connected improperly, in part because of the ‘extra stress’ from the scheduling of two executions the same day.”
Beyond the logistical and operational problems of doing more than one execution in a day, it compounds the stress and mental health problems that are a regular part of the experience of those who have to carry out the executions.
On April 24, 2017, Arkansas also ran into problems when it carried out two executions in a span of three hours. It took more than 45 minutes for state officials to find a usable vein in the first inmate before it could kill him by lethal injection.
Beyond the logistical and operational problems of doing more than one execution in a day, it compounds the stress and mental health problems that are a regular part of the experience of those who have to carry out the executions.
A 2022 NPR story offers a detailed account documenting the “serious mental and physical repercussions” personnel suffer. Jeanne Woodford, a warden who oversaw four executions in California’s San Quentin State Prison, told NPR: “‘People think that it would be so easy to go up and execute someone who had committed such heinous acts … But the truth is, killing a human being is hard. It should be hard.’”
Woodford detailed the psychological and moral burden of what NPR described as having “to speak with the person slated to die, then talk with his family to receive instructions for what to later do with his body. Afterward,” the report continued, “she had to speak with the other family involved, too — the family of the victim.”
Imagine having to do those things twice on the same day.
“You just don’t know what to say to people who are in so much pain,” Woodford said. “And no one is sensitive to the fact that you, as the warden, are sitting there thinking, in 30 days, I’m going to have to go in and give the order to carry out an execution of a human being.”
It could only be worse if it were just three hours or 30 minutes until she or anyone else would have to give that order again.
And executing people like Duckett and Occhicone, one after the other, should be distasteful to all who believe in what former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan called the “guarantees of justice and fair play and simple human dignity which have made our land what it is.”
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