At noon on July 28, 2026, James Duckett will be strapped to a gurney inside a small, windowless room at Florida State Prison in Raiford. A curtain will open. Witnesses will watch through glass.
A series of chemicals will enter his bloodstream and stop his heart. If it happens, it will end a story that has stretched nearly four decades.
But this is not like almost any other execution scheduled in America this year.
James Duckett was a police officer. His victim was 11 years old. And to this very day, there are attorneys, advocates, and even some who worked the original case who are not certain the state got the right man.
Mascotte, Florida is the kind of town most people have never heard of. Small, quiet Central Florida citrus country, about 45 minutes west of Orlando. In 1987, the town had one police department, a handful of officers, and the kind of familiarity where everybody knew everybody.
James R. N. Duckett was one of those officers, a 29-year-old rookie patrolling alone on the night shift.
The kind of job where nothing much ever happened, until one night in May when everything happened at once.
Eleven-year-old Teresa McAbee lived nearby. On the night of May 11, 1987, she did something completely ordinary.
She needed a pencil to finish her math homework. So she walked to the Circle K convenience store a few hundred feet from her house. She never made it back home.
By the next morning, her body was found in a lake less than a mile from that store. She had been raped, strangled, and drowned.
The last confirmed adult to have contact with her that night was the man wearing the badge.
Here is what investigators pieced together. Between 10:00 and 10:30 p. m.
, Duckett was on solo patrol when he came across Teresa outside the Circle K. She was with a 16-year-old boy she knew who had been doing laundry at a nearby laundromat. Duckett asked the store clerk how old the girl was.
Then he approached both of them.
According to witnesses, including the boy and the boy’s uncle, Duckett told Teresa she was out past curfew, put her in his patrol car, and drove off with her. Duckett’s version was different.
He said he simply told her to go home, and that was the last time he saw her.
Teresa never came home. Her mother called the police.
And in a detail that would follow this case for decades, it was Duckett himself who filed the missing person’s report on the girl he had last been seen driving away with. He refused help from his police chief that night. He did not post a flyer for her at the Circle K, the last place she was seen, even though he handed flyers to two other people elsewhere in town.
The next morning, her body was pulled from Night Lake, not far from where she vanished. There was no confession. There was no eyewitness to the murder itself.
What there was, was a chain of forensic and circumstantial evidence that investigators believed pointed to one man.
Tire tracks near where Teresa’s body was found matched an unusual set of snow tires, tires that had been mistakenly installed on Duckett’s patrol vehicle by a local shop. Fingerprints belonging to both Duckett and Teresa were found on the hood of his patrol car.
Experts testified the print pattern suggested she had been sitting or scooting backward across the hood. A palm print was also recovered and tied to the scene.
And then there was the hair.
An FBI forensic examiner named Michael Malone testified that pubic hairs taken from Duckett were microscopically consistent with hair recovered from the crime scene and from Teresa’s underwear. At the time, hair matching testimony carried enormous weight with juries. It sounded scientific.
It sounded certain. It would later become one of the most contested pieces of evidence in the entire case.
Duckett was not arrested immediately.
It took five months, an investigation, a grand jury, before in October 1987, a Lake County grand jury indicted him for first-degree murder. In early 1988, he stood trial. Prosecutors announced they would seek the death penalty against a man who, only months earlier, had worn a badge in that same community.
The trial leaned heavily on the physical evidence, the tires, the fingerprints, the hair analysis, stitched together into a single narrative: that Duckett had used his position and his patrol car to isolate an 11-year-old girl, and that he alone had the opportunity to do what was done to her.
The defense pushed back on nearly every piece of it. They argued Teresa’s fingerprints on the hood could be explained by her simply sitting there while talking to an officer, an innocent everyday interaction.
They argued a second hair found on her body did not match Duckett at all. They argued the tire tracks proved nothing more than the fact that Duckett, like any officer, had driven near the lake after the body was discovered as part of the search.
The jury did not see it that way.
On May 10, 1988, James Duckett was convicted of first-degree murder and sexual battery. On June 30, 1988, he was sentenced to death. He was 29 when he lost the girl at the convenience store.
He was 30 when he was sentenced to die for her murder. He is 68 now.
For almost four decades, James Duckett has said the same thing: He didn’t do it.
That alone is not unusual. Most people on death row maintain their innocence. What makes this case different is how much of the original evidence has since come under serious question.
Duckett’s attorneys say the state’s key witness later admitted she had agreed to testify in exchange for an early release from jail, testimony they characterize as fabricated in exchange for freedom. If true, it strikes at the credibility of testimony jurors relied on to place Teresa in Duckett’s custody that night.
The hair match testimony from FBI examiner Michael Malone has not aged well.
In the years since Duckett’s trial, Malone’s work in multiple cases nationwide came under scrutiny, and hair comparison analysis of the kind used against Duckett has since been widely discredited as a forensic science. It is no longer considered reliable enough to support a conviction on its own in most courts today.
Duckett’s attorneys argue the science that helped convict him simply would not hold up under current standards.
At trial, three young women testified that Duckett had behaved inappropriately toward them in the past. His attorneys say none of those claims were independently corroborated and argue they were used to paint a character portrait rather than prove what happened on the night Teresa died.
Duckett’s legal team has pointed to other people they say deserved more scrutiny, including the 16-year-old boy Teresa was with earlier that night and men connected to her mother.
They argue investigators fixated on Duckett, a police officer, and did not pursue other leads with the same intensity.
And then there is the DNA. In the final months before his originally scheduled execution, a judge granted Duckett’s request to test biological evidence, semen and hair recovered from Teresa’s clothing.
Using modern DNA technology that did not exist in 1988, his attorneys believed the results could either confirm his guilt once and for all or clear him entirely.
A stay of execution was issued in March 2026, days before Duckett was set to die, specifically so this testing could happen. The results came back inconclusive.
Duckett’s legal team argues the outcome was not really about what the DNA could or could not show. It was about how the testing was handled.
They say the state chose the laboratory.
The state chose the testing method. And they argue that method was not capable of the more advanced whole genome analysis that might have produced a clearer answer. The state disagrees.
Prosecutors argue the original conviction was sound, that the physical evidence at trial was substantial, and that inconclusive does not mean exculpatory. It simply means the test did not produce a usable result either way.
In July 2026, the Florida Supreme Court lifted the stay.
Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new death warrant, and a new date was set: July 28th. Duckett’s attorneys called it particularly shameful that the state scheduled his execution just two weeks after the DNA results came back, and on the same day as another man’s execution.
If James Duckett is executed on July 28th, 2026, he will not die alone that day.
Six hours after his scheduled noon execution, 80-year-old Dominic Aquacone is set to die in the same execution chamber for a 1986 double murder in Pasco County. If both executions proceed, it will be the first time Florida has executed two people on the same day since 1964, before the modern death penalty era even began.
This execution would also mark Florida’s 11th of the year, part of an unprecedented pace under Governor DeSantis, who oversaw a record 19 executions in 2025, more than any governor in the state’s modern history.
The previous high, for comparison, was eight in a single year.
There is no confirmed final statement yet. No confirmed last meal.
Those details, if this execution proceeds as scheduled, will become part of the public record on July 28th, the final chapter of a story that has already run for 39 years.
What is confirmed is this: Duckett’s legal team has said they intend to appeal to the United States Supreme Court before any execution can move forward. Whether that appeal succeeds, fails, or simply runs out of time before noon on the 28th remains unknown.
James Duckett has spent more of his life on death row than he ever spent free as a police officer. For 39 years, he has said the same three words: “I didn’t do it.” For 39 years, the state of Florida has said the jury got it right.
The tires matched. The fingerprints were there. The hair evidence, however outdated now, convinced 12 people beyond a reasonable doubt in 1988.
And the DNA testing that was supposed to settle the question once and for all came back with no clear answer at all.
In eight days, the state plans to give James Duckett a lethal injection for the murder of an 11-year-old girl who only wanted to buy a pencil for her homework.
So the question this case leaves behind is not really about James Duckett at all.
It is this: when physical evidence is old, when forensic methods have since been discredited, and when new testing comes back inconclusive, how sure does a state need to be before it decides a case is finally closed?
