Alarm as Florida rushes to carry out ‘incredibly rare’ double execution

Rights groups condemn secrecy surrounding killings and say hurry to execute raises chance of ‘torturous’ deaths

Florida is preparing on Tuesday to carry out the state’s first double execution within a single day since the start of the modern era of the US death penalty in 1976.

Barring last-minute legal intervention, James Aren Duckett, 68, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at noon on Tuesday at Florida state prison near Starke. Six hours later, Dominick Anthony Occhicone, 80, faces the same fate.

Should both killings be completed, it would be the first time since 2017 that a death penalty state has conducted more than one execution on the same day. On 24 April 2017 Arkansas administered lethal doses to two prisoners, Jack Jones and Marcel Williams, just three hours apart and amid chaotic scenes that suggested the procedures were botched.

In Florida itself, a review by the Associated Press showed that 1964 was the last time there were multiple judicial killing on a single day.

“Two executions in a day is incredibly rare,” said Robin Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. She added that the decision to go ahead by Florida’s hardline Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, was all the more bewildering given that it was shrouded in secrecy.

“That is consistent with the secrecy that has surrounded every execution, and every execution decision, that Florida is making these days,” Maher said.

Under DeSantis’s leadership, Florida has pulled way ahead of the pack of death penalty states, eclipsing even the previous champion of the ultimate punishment, Texas. Last year Florida carried out 19 executions, single-handedly reversing a decade-long decline in judicial killings in the US as a whole.

This year the pace of Florida’s executions shows no sign of flagging . Even before Tuesday’s double execution bonanza, the state had put to death 10 people – more than double the next most prolific state, Texas, with four.

“DeSantis has been setting execution dates roughly every two weeks, which is an extraordinary pace. And always without explanation or rationale, and without any sort of institutional check on his authority,” Maher said.

Cramming more than one execution into a day carries with it considerable risks, experts say. The human rights group Reprieve has examined all the botched executions since 1976 and found that haste was a factor behind several of them.

“By rushing executions, Florida is increasing the chances that these and other men will suffer a torturous death,” Matt Wells, deputy director of Reprieve US, said.

Wells added that public records show that Florida has been violating its own execution protocols on a regular basis, using expired drugs and at the wrong doses. An iron wall of secrecy compounded the problem because there was no accountability inside the death chamber.

“Men could die in agony and witnesses wouldn’t know it,” Wells said. “Florida uses a paralytic designed to prevent signs of visible pain.”

In February, the US supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor described the secrecy around Florida’s death penalty practices as “intolerable”.

Both Tuesday’s condemned prisoners have complications associated with their cases. For Occhicone, there is his age. The 80-year-old inmate was sent to death row for murdering his former girlfriend’s parents in 1986. “He’s a frail old man who doesn’t pose a security threat to anyone,” Maher said.

If Occhicone dies, he will be the oldest prisoner in Florida’s history to be executed. That would surpass the previous oldest prisoner – Dennis Sochor – who was put to death two weeks ago aged 74.

Duckett, a former police officer, was sentenced to death for murdering an 11-year-old girl in 1987. He claims that he is innocent of the crime, and DNA testing of crime scene evidence was inconclusive.

In both cases, the men were put on death row by divided juries. The jury at Occhicone’s trial voted by seven votes to five for capital punishment, and at Duckett’s trial by eight votes to four.

“In both cases, neither jury was unanimous for the death sentence,” Maher said.

The flurry of executions in Florida is just part of the turmoil that is rippling across the largely southern US death penalty states. Difficulties procuring lethal injection drugs in the face of an international boycott has led to the revival of the firing squad.

Unreliable forensic techniques continue to undermine the credibility of death sentences. Last month the Louisiana supreme court formally set free a death row inmate, Jimmie Duncan, ruling that the bite mark analysis on which his murder conviction had been secured was “scientifically indefensible”.

A forensic dentist and pathologist had testified that bite marks found on the body of Duncan’s former girlfriend’s child, Haley Oliveaux, had matched the defendant’s teeth. Such a definitive approach has been debunked as junk science.