In a sweeping 34-page ruling issued Thursday, the Florida Supreme Court blocked the imminent execution of James Aren Duckett, a former Mascotte police officer convicted of a notorious 1987 child murder.
The decision mandates that the state release raw genetic data to defense experts, potentially upending a case that has been litigated for nearly four decades.
The ruling comes just weeks after Governor Ron DeSantis signed a death warrant on February 27, 2026, scheduling Duckett’s execution for March 31 at 6:00 p.m. at Florida State Prison in Raiford. If carried out, it would mark the state’s fifth execution this year, following a record-breaking 19 executions in 2025.
The Crimes of 1987
The case against Duckett dates back to May 11, 1987, and involves the death of 11-year-old Teresa McAbee. Duckett, who was on duty as a police officer at the time, was convicted of taking the young girl to a nearby lake where she was sexually battered, strangled, and drowned.
The original conviction relied heavily on circumstantial and forensic evidence connecting Duckett’s patrol car to the scene. Investigators noted that McAbee was last seen entering the officer’s vehicle at a convenience store less than a mile from the lake where her body was found.
Crime scene technicians discovered “distinctive tire tracks” at the water’s edge that matched the tires on Duckett’s patrol vehicle.
READ: Florida Supreme Court Clears Path For Execution Of Man In 1976 Killing Of Step-Niece
According to the death warrant, a primary factor in the conviction was the presence of the girl’s fingerprints on the hood of the car. Investigators testified that the prints indicated she had been “sitting backwards on the hood and had scooted up the car.”
While Attorney General James Uthmeier recently stated that the record is “legally sufficient” to proceed with the execution after 30 years of appeals, the high court has now hit the brakes.
The DNA Dispute
The current legal battle centers on a 1987 swab from the victim’s clothing. While previous testing methods were too primitive to analyze the sample without destroying it, modern Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) technology allowed for a new attempt this year.
After the Governor signed the warrant, a private lab, DNA Labs International (DLI), performed the testing. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) subsequently characterized the results as “inconclusive,” stating that the lab lacked the specific “mechanism” to provide a statistical weight to the male DNA found on the sample.
The Supreme Court ruled that the circuit court erred by denying Duckett access to the raw data used to reach that “inconclusive” finding. The justices argued that for DNA results to be useful or admissible, they must include the underlying data necessary for a bioinformaticist to conduct a full statistical analysis.
“Mr. Duckett has maintained his innocence for the nearly 40 years he has spent on Florida’s death row,” said Grace Hanna, Executive Director of Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “If the State has not even completed the scientific analysis of the DNA evidence, it cannot claim certainty about guilt.”
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The Supreme Court has now remanded the case back to the circuit court with strict instructions:
- The state must provide the underlying DNA testing data to the defense.
- A qualified expert will be permitted to perform an independent statistical analysis.
- If there is any dispute over the scope or extent of the data provided, the circuit court is required to hold an evidentiary hearing.
The stay of execution remains in effect indefinitely while these proceedings take place. While the majority of the court agreed that the “complete results” of the test must be shared, Justice Tanenbaum issued a dissent, arguing that the court lacked jurisdiction to intervene and that the DNA proceedings should have been considered finalized once the lab report was filed.
For now, the execution remains on hold as the legal system waits for science to provide a more definitive answer regarding the evidence found on Teresa McAbee’s clothing four decades ago.
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