Florida Supreme Court allows further DNA analysis for ex-cop facing execution

Dan Sullivan, Tampa Bay Times on Apr 30, 2026

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The Florida Supreme Court will allow further analysis of DNA testing results in the case of James Duckett, a former police officer who came close to being executed in March for a 1987 child murder.

In an opinion issued Thursday, the state’s highest court reversed a trial judge’s denial of Duckett’s request to obtain DNA testing data that his lawyers believe could exonerate him.

The court ordered the data should be provided for statistical analysis and that the trial judge should hold a hearing, if necessary.

Duckett, 68, has always maintained he is innocent. He was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1987 Lake County murder of 11-year-old Teresa McAbee.

The girl vanished late one night that May after she walked to a Circle K near her home in the small town of Mascotte to buy a pencil to do her math homework. She was found in a nearby lake the next morning, raped, strangled and drowned.

Suspicion fell on Duckett, one of the town’s two police officers. He’d been seen with the girl outside the store shortly before she went missing. Tire tracks near the murder scene matched his patrol car. Her fingerprints were found on the car’s hood.

But the case bore some hallmarks of wrongful convictions. They included faulty hair analysis and a jailhouse informant’s testimony, and later recantation, that she’d seen McAbee in Duckett’s patrol car.

Duckett’s attorneys for decades sought to conduct DNA testing on evidence in the case, but the technology was deemed not advanced enough until recent years.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a death warrant for Duckett in February.

In the face of a March 31 execution, Duckett’s attorneys asked for advanced DNA analysis by a private lab. Specifically, they asked to test a sample of genetic material taken from McAbee’s underwear. The results, they argued, could show the material did not match Duckett’s DNA, meaning that someone else committed the murder.

Lake County Circuit Judge Brian Welke allowed the testing to be conducted by DNA Labs International, a company with a laboratory in Deerfield Beach. But the results were later deemed inconclusive.

Amid the legal wrangling, the highest court issued a stay of execution five days before Duckett was to be put to death. The death warrant later expired.

Duckett’s defense asked that the testing data be examined by a bioinformaticist, an expert in analyzing complex biological data. They argued further analysis of the test results could give a clearer answer about whether the DNA evidence matches Duckett or someone else.

State prosecutors argued that no further analysis was necessary, as the results did not exonerate him.

Welke sided with the state. The defense then turned to the Florida Supreme Court.

In its ruling Thursday, the court agreed with Duckett’s attorneys that without access to the complete testing data for analysis, he had been denied full results.

Six of the court’s seven justices concurred in the opinion. Justice Adam Tanenbaum, the court’s newest jurist who was appointed by DeSantis in January, wrote a dissent.

He opined that the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to consider Duckett’s appeal and should dismiss it. He also accused Duckett of “gaming the process ... to delay execution of his sentence, which he has yet to demonstrate is unlawful, despite his having had decades to do so.”

“The defendant has had his ‘day in court’ — many days in fact," Tanenbaum wrote. “Over the decades this court has rejected his legal challenges to his conviction and sentence of death.”

The organization Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty issued a statement after the court’s ruling. It noted that Florida has more death row exonerees than any other state.

“If the state has not even completed the scientific analysis of the DNA evidence, it cannot claim certainty about guilt,” said Grace Hanna, the group’s executive director. “Today’s ruling confirms what we have been saying all along: the process is not finished and the truth is still unresolved.”