Florida has disclosed the final meal requests of two death row prisoners put to death less than five hours apart, marking the state’s first same-day double execution in modern times and the first such back-to-back execution carried out anywhere in the U.S. in nearly 10 years.
James Duckett, a 68-year-old former police officer, and Dominick Occhicone, 80, who became the oldest inmate executed in Florida’s modern era, were both administered lethal injections Tuesday inside the death chamber at Florida State Prison near Starke.
Duckett, condemned for the 1987 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl while he was on duty near Orlando, chose a breakfast-style final meal of eggs, grits, bacon, biscuits and chocolate milk, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
Occhicone, who was sentenced to death for fatally shooting his former girlfriend’s parents in 1986 in Holiday, north of Clearwater, requested eggplant parmesan with a salad, garlic bread and a Pepsi, according to the report.
Before Tuesday, Arkansas had been the most recent state to conduct two executions in a single day, doing so in April 2017. Florida had not executed two prisoners on the same date since 1964.
The executions made Duckett the 11th and Occhicone the 12th prisoners put to death in Florida this year, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected their appeals and denied last-minute requests to halt the lethal injections.
