SCOTUS Gives Florida Greenlight To Get Justice Against Child Killer
Florida carried out the execution of former police officer James Aren Duckett on Tuesday after the U.S. Supreme Court and Florida’s highest court rejected his final attempts to delay the sentence.
Duckett, 68, was pronounced dead at 1:19 p.m. on July 28 at Florida State Prison. He had spent more than three decades on death row following his conviction in the 1987 sexual assault and murder of 11-year-old Teresa McAbee.
Gov. Ron DeSantis initially signed Duckett’s death warrant in February. The execution was postponed after courts authorized additional DNA testing, but the results were inconclusive and did not exonerate him.
On July 24, the Florida Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s rejection of Duckett’s sixth successive postconviction motion and his latest request for additional DNA testing.
“We affirm the circuit court’s rulings. We therefore deny Duckett’s motion for a stay of execution.”
The court concluded that previous testing “did not exonerate Duckett” and that his additional claims were either procedurally barred or lacked legal merit. It also ordered that no rehearing would be considered.
Duckett’s attorneys then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that refusing further DNA testing violated due process.
They maintained that “no direct evidence has ever linked Mr. Duckett to the crime” and warned that untested evidence could reveal innocence or affect the validity of his sentence.
The Supreme Court rejected the stay request on July 28, clearing the way for Florida to carry out the execution. The justices also denied a separate request from death-row inmate Dominick Occhicone, who was executed later that day.
Duckett was serving as a police officer in Mascotte, Florida, when McAbee disappeared. A jury later convicted him, and his sentence survived decades of state and federal appeals.
Following the signing of his death warrant, courts allowed limited DNA testing requested by his defense. The results proved inconclusive and provided no basis for overturning the conviction.
Subsequent efforts to obtain additional testing were rejected as untimely and unlikely to produce evidence that would exonerate Duckett.
One justice characterized certain filings as “both time-barred and frivolous, undoubtedly filed only for unreasonably delaying his execution further.”
The case renewed the longstanding debate over finality in capital cases.
Death-penalty opponents argued that inconclusive DNA evidence justified further review. Supporters maintained that Duckett had already received decades of appeals, multiple opportunities to challenge the evidence and access to additional testing before the sentence was enforced.
For McAbee’s family, the execution ended a legal process that lasted nearly 40 years.
The courts determined that Duckett’s conviction remained legally valid and that his latest filings did not establish grounds for another delay. Florida then enforced the sentence imposed by the jury and repeatedly upheld through appellate review.
The execution was one of two carried out by Florida on July 28, marking the state’s first double-execution day in more than six decades.
The case demonstrates that constitutional review and final accountability are not mutually exclusive. Defendants facing the most severe punishment must receive meaningful opportunities to challenge their convictions, but the justice system cannot allow successive filings to postpone lawful sentences indefinitely after those claims have been fully examined.
Teresa McAbee lost her life as a child. Nearly four decades later, the final judgment in her case was carried out.