Florida carried out two executions in one day on Tuesday for the first time in nearly a decade, the Associated Press reports.

The first was former police officer James Aaron Duckett, who had been sentenced to death for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Teresa McBee in 1987.

The 68-year-old Duckett was given a lethal injection at Florida State Prison. Before the execution, he declined to make a final statement. Relatives of the slain girl said they had waited decades for this day. “I’ve waited nearly 40 years for him to die,” said the victim’s mother, Dorothy Tula.

Later on Tuesday, Florida authorities planned to carry out a second death sentence, that of 80-year-old Dominic Anthony Occhicone, convicted of murdering the parents of his former girlfriend in 1986. If executed, he would become the second-oldest person executed in modern U.S. history.

The last time two death sentences were carried out in one day in the United States was in 2017, when two executions took place in Arkansas.

Florida has sharply increased the number of executions over the past year and a half. Since the start of 2025, the state has carried out 30 death sentences — more than all other U.S. states combined over the same period. Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who will leave office in January, has signed more death warrants than any other Florida governor since the restoration of the death penalty in the United States in 1976.

Supporters of abolishing the death penalty criticized the authorities’ actions, calling the two executions in one day an “unprecedented escalation” in the use of capital punishment. DeSantis’ administration says the acceleration of executions is driven by a desire to deliver justice for victims’ families, who have waited decades for the sentences to be carried out.