The Florida Supreme Court issued an order Thursday afternoon staying the scheduled execution of James Aren Duckett, just five days before he was set to be put to death by lethal injection.
Duckett, a former police officer convicted of the 1987 sexual battery and murder of an 11-year-old girl, was scheduled to die at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday, March 31.
The high court’s intervention comes as a result of unfinished DNA testing on a piece of evidence from the original crime scene—a swab taken from the victim’s underwear.
The legal pause stems from a motion for postconviction DNA testing filed by Duckett following the issuance of his death warrant in late February.
While the State of Florida did not object to the testing, arguing that the evidence was “potentially exculpatory,” a lower circuit court granted the request but gave the State full control over the location and method of the analysis. That testing is currently underway but has not yet produced a result.
In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Muñiz and five other justices agreed to the stay, citing their discretion to halt a sentence “incident to an appeal.” The court has ordered the State to submit a status report on the DNA testing by 5:00 p.m. on Friday, March 27.
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The decision was not unanimous. Justice Tanenbaum issued a stinging dissent, pointing out that Duckett has been on death row for nearly 40 years and had previously declined to test this specific evidence decades ago.
“The defendant likely was eligible for a warrant as of 2011,” Tanenbaum wrote, noting that the “new” testing methodology Duckett requested has been available for years. “He failed to explain why he waited until the Governor signed the warrant to pursue all of this, which he clearly could have done sooner with the exercise of some diligence.”
The dissent argued that the court lacks the statutory authority to issue a stay in this specific appeal, suggesting instead that the Governor or a different type of legal writ should handle the delay. Tanenbaum expressed concern that the stay was unnecessary, stating, “If the results cannot be obtained in time, we should trust the Governor to stay the execution on his own.”
For now, the execution remains on hold pending the results of the lab work. If the DNA results are returned quickly, the court could theoretically lift the stay before the current warrant expires on April 7, though the immediate March 31 date is no longer active.
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