James Aren Duckett, who long maintained his innocence in the horrific rape and drowning of an 11-year-old Lake County girl nearly four decades ago, was executed Tuesday afternoon.
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While restrained onto a gurney at Florida State Prison in Raiford — his hands and fingers secured to the side — Duckett declined to say any final words before he was put to death at 1:19 p.m., according to the Florida Department of Corrections.
He was then injected with a three-drug cocktail that put the 68-year-old inmate to sleep, paralyzed him and stopped his heart.
It was the first of two executions scheduled on the same day. Dominick Anthony Occhicone, 80, is slated to be put to death at 6 p.m., becoming the oldest prisoner executed in modern Florida history. Occhicone was convicted of the 1986 killings of his ex-girlfriend’s parents in Pasco County.
If Occhicone was put to death as planned, it would be the first time since 1964 that Florida executed two inmates on the same day.
Hours before his execution, Duckett’s team of lawyers filed last-minute appeals with the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of execution to allow several items of clothing that young Teresa McAbee was wearing on the night of her death in May 1987 be tested for DNA, along with vaginal swabs and scrapings from under her fingernails. They’d unsuccessfully appealed to lower courts previously.
Justice Clarence Thomas denied the appeals without comment just moments before Duckett’s death. Duckett’s execution, scheduled for noon, was delayed by more than an hour as prison officials awaited word from the nation’s top court.
A federal judge in Jacksonville on Monday also denied requests by Duckett’s legal team to halt the execution. The Florida Supreme Court refused to issue a stay in Duckett’s execution last week.
“It is of no import to the State of Florida that they will execute an innocent man, so long as the proceedings keep their conviction intact,” said attorney Elizabeth Wells, who’s represented Duckett for decades, in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Anti-death penalty protestors held vigils and prayer services across the state before Duckett’s execution.
At the steps of the Lake County Courthouse in Tavares Tuesday morning, four death penalty protestors prepared to toll a massive bell to coincide with Duckett’s execution.
Abraham Bonowitz, executive director of advocacy group Death Penalty Action, drove from Ohio with the about 400-pound bell in tow, which he said has been rung in dozens of states.
“One of the real challenges is that most people are totally unaware that this is even going on,” he said, regarding the rare double execution. “When we toll this bell, there’s going to be no mistaking that we’re out here.”
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Florida’s appellate law states that after a jury issues a conviction, the burden shifts to the inmate to prove their innocence. State prosecutors said all the evidence in the Duckett case has been examined through decades of appeals and additional DNA testing would not present definitive evidence to show he did not rape and kill Teresa.
On May 11, 1987, Teresa — a middle school student — asked her mom if she could walk to a nearby convenience in a small plaza facing State Road 50 in Mascotte, a rural town of barely 1,700 residents at the time. She needed a pencil to finish her homework.
Duckett — who was sitting in his patrol car across the street running radar — saw Teresa walk into the store and then walk out.
Gwen Gurley, one of the teenagers near the convenience store that night, testified that she later saw Teresa being driven away by Duckett. But others contradicted her account, and Gurley later recanted her story.
Teresa’s body was found the next morning floating face down near the shore of a small lake at the end of a dirt road less than a mile away.
Duckett was indicted by a grand jury in October 1987 and charged with her rape and murder. He was found guilty in 1988 and sentenced to death.
His supporters said Duckett — with a wife and two young boys at the time — worked hard to become a police officer, such as losing weight before attending a police academy. He was hired by the Mascotte Police department in November 1986.
Why, they asked, would he leave the body of his victim in open view near the crime scene knowing about police forensics?
But Teresa’s family and others asked, if Duckett was innocent, why would he, as a police officer, let an 11-year-old girl walk home by herself in the dark?
In Tavares on Tuesday, Tony Ehrlich, sporting a straw hat and pink cane, joined the other protesters and sat on the courthouse steps with a sign that read, “Are you willing to be the innocent person executed?”
The 90-year-old Volusia County resident has traveled to the state prison in Raiford to protest executions frequently since January, he said, this time opting for location closer to his home.
“They’re human beings,” he said of death row inmates. “And we should treat them like human beings and not like animals.”
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Then he tolled the bell again and again.