Something broke last Tuesday in Florida. Not just the law, not just the record books, but something harder to name. The state executed two men on the same gurney, in the same room, by the same team, six hours apart. It had never done this in the modern era of capital punishment. It did it anyway, without explanation, without the standard review window, and apparently without hesitation.

Florida is not a state among many states on this issue right now. It is in a category by itself. Twelve of the nineteen executions carried out in the entire United States in 2026 happened in Florida. More than half. And with two more death warrants already signed and scheduled, the pace is not slowing.

Florida Abolitionists for Death Penalty Executive Director Grace Hanna wrote to supporters this week in language that doesn’t soften what’s happening: “Florida’s killing spree is meant to leave us feeling powerless.” That framing is deliberate. This isn’t a description of individual criminal justice decisions. It’s an acknowledgment that what’s happening in Florida is systematic, deliberate, and moving fast.

What Actually Happened on July 28

James Duckett died at noon. He maintained his innocence in the 1987 murder of 11-year-old Teresa McAbee for every year of his four decades on death row. His case contained nearly every marker that wrongful conviction researchers identify as high-risk: an 8-to-4 non-unanimous jury recommendation for death, an eyewitness later found to have been coerced by police, an FBI forensic analyst whose hair comparison testimony has since been classified as junk science, and prosecutorial misconduct in the form of evidence withheld from the defense for 14 years.

There was biological material preserved on a microscopic slide from the case. Sperm heads, fragile but present, that a laboratory called Othram, Inc. had the technology to analyze. Othram is internationally recognized for its work recovering DNA from small and degraded samples. Jim’s lawyers asked to send the evidence there. The State said no. The State insisted on sending it to a Florida lab without the necessary capability. The sample was consumed and destroyed in the process. The answer to whether James Duckett actually killed Teresa McAbee is now permanently beyond reach.

That detail is not a rhetorical flourish. It’s documented, verifiable, and it directly implicates the integrity of the administration’s decision-making in a capital case where the stakes were a man’s life.

Six hours after Jim Duckett’s death, Dominick Occhicone was executed. He was 80 years old. His jury had voted 7 to 5 for death in 1988, a recommendation that under no current law in the United States, including today’s Florida statutes, would qualify anyone for execution. He spent 40 years on death row, found his faith, met two daughters he hadn’t known about, played cards with his grandchildren on visitation days, and became an old man in the most constrained and improbable circumstances imaginable. He was physically frail, walking with difficulty, and by every account remorseful for the violence he had committed in an alcohol-fueled crisis four decades earlier.

His son, himself incarcerated, wanted to speak to his father before the execution. Prison regulations prohibiting communication between incarcerated people made that impossible. He now sits in a cell in the same town where his father’s body will be cremated.

Two Men Already Scheduled. The Work Continues.

This is the compounding nature of what Florida is doing. It isn’t just the executions themselves. It’s the pace at which they’re being scheduled, which consumes legal defense capacity, which exhausts advocacy organizations, which grinds down the people who show up every time to bear witness. The intent, whether stated or not, is what Grace Hanna named directly: to leave people feeling powerless.

The People Who Refused to Look Away

They stood outside Florida State Prison through both executions on Tuesday. Not just through one. Through both, hours apart, in the heat of a Florida summer afternoon and into the evening. Among them were Bishop William Wack of the Catholic Diocese of Pensacola-Tallahassee and Herman Lindsey, the 23rd person exonerated from Florida’s death row. The exoneree standing vigil for the executed. Think about what that means for a moment.

A church opened its doors between the two vigils so people had somewhere to go, somewhere to gather and hold each other in the six hours between a noon execution and a 6 PM execution. Abe Bonowitz of Death Penalty Action and SueZann Bosler of Journey of Hope spread the word at the Lake and Pasco County courthouses. The FADP team worked through the night, including Bridget, who was literally sitting for the Bar exam on Tuesday while this was happening around her. Volunteers brought food and water and held signs and rang bells and wrote letters and called offices and refused to let two men die entirely in silence.

A Warden Who Can No Longer Stay Silent

His statement matters in a particular way this week. ProPublica and The New York Times published a joint investigation into the pace of executions at Florida State Prison, written by Pamela Colloff, with a line that describes the current state of things as well as anything published this year: “Death watch, once a lonely way station, has begun to resemble an assembly line.” That line is going to be quoted for a long time. It should be.

Former Tennessee corrections officer Ian Congleton wrote to Governor Bill Lee asking him to pause executions until the Department of Corrections can demonstrate it is carrying them out in compliance with its own protocol. His motivation, he wrote, was the trauma he experienced after working on executions. He’s not alone. Corrections professionals who participate in executions at high frequency carry documented psychological consequences that the public discourse about the death penalty rarely addresses. Florida is asking its people to kill at a rate no state has sustained in the modern era.

The Broader Legal Landscape: Forensic Science on Trial

These cases are not separate from what is happening in Florida. They are part of the same national conversation about what criminal justice is actually for, whether the forensic science underlying capital convictions is as reliable as courts have historically assumed, and whether the irreversibility of execution can ever be justified in a system that demonstrably convicts and sentences the wrong people.

Mark Your Calendar: Florida’s Death Penalty at 50

Why does a historical retrospective matter right now? Because the people who built the modern death penalty in Florida, who litigated it from the beginning and watched what it became, are the ones who can explain how we got here. John Spenkelink was the first person Florida executed in 1979. The lawyers who fought for his life are still here, still fighting. Understanding where this started helps clarify what it is going to take to end it.

What Remains

James Duckett is dead. The evidence that might have proven his innocence was destroyed by the State before it killed him. Dominick Occhicone is dead, executed under a sentencing standard that the law itself has since recognized as unconstitutional. Teresa McAbee and Martha and Raymond Artzner remain gone, their families still carrying grief that no execution resolves.

William Silvia has three weeks. Harold Lucas has five. Their attorneys, who buried a client on Tuesday and have two more clients facing death, are working right now.

The correction officers who carried out two executions on Tuesday are going home to their families. The legal team that lost Jim Duckett is preparing Silvia’s appeal. The people who stood vigil outside Florida State Prison in July heat are making plans to do it again in August. This is what it looks like to refuse to look away.

Florida’s killing spree has a political author and a political address. The power to slow it or stop it belongs to the governor who is running it and the legislators and voters who can demand he answer for it. Making that case, loudly and persistently, in the weeks between now and August 18, is the work that remains.