Doubts persist as to whether police officer James Duckett was guilty of the 1987 murder of an 11-year-old girl in suburban Orlando. In the decades since his conviction and death sentence, much of the circumstantial case against him has fallen apart.

That may be why six governors would not sign his death warrant. That changed when Gov. Ron DeSantis scheduled Duckett’s execution for March 31. It’s business as usual for a governor who cranks out death warrants at a record pace.

But the Florida Supreme Court last month intervened and ordered advanced DNA testing on the last surviving sample from the case, a badly degraded lab slide with biological material from the jeans that Teresa McAbee wore the night she was murdered.

It’s one extraordinary last reach for certainty, using testing methods so advanced that only a handful of U.S. labs are certified to perform them.

Justice derailed

What followed was a travesty. Defense lawyers selected a highly respected Texas lab that promised the DNA testing and analysis would take two weeks or less.

But prosecutors insisted the sample be sent to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, even after FDLE said its labs didn’t perform such advanced testing.

FDLE sent the sample to a private lab in Deerfield Beach that could not process and analyze the sample in time to meet court deadlines. The lab could perform only the first part of the test, using methods less precise than the state-of-the-art technology Texas offered.

FDLE described its results as “inconclusive,” but that’s not true. The reality is that the DNA testing is unfinished. The sample, along with DNA taken from Duckett, has been reduced to data. The analysis required to declare a match (guilty) or a mismatch (innocent) and calculate a degree of certainty has not been attempted.

The state refuses to send the data to a lab capable of analyzing it, and refuses to give the defense its own copy of the data so it can be sent to the Texas lab.

The implication is clear: Prosecutors worry that the sample could prove Duckett was wrongfully convicted.

That’s perilously close to defying the Supreme Court’s clear intentions — which were expressed even after FDLE came out with its “inconclusive” finding.

There is ample basis for prosecutors’ concerns. The circumstantial case against Duckett has been seriously undermined in the years since his conviction.

Shaky from the start

Duckett was on duty, alone, in Mascotte, in Lake County, the night of May 11, 1987. He was seen talking to Teresa in a convenience store parking lot. The next day, her body was retrieved from a lake a few miles away. She had been raped, strangled and drowned.

Suspicion centered on Duckett almost immediately. He was the last person she was seen talking to, and a witness said she saw the girl getting into Duckett’s patrol car.

Evidence mounted. The girl’s fingerprints were on the patrol car’s hood, intermingled with Duckett’s. After his arrest, a single hair found in Teresa’s underwear was declared by an FBI analyst to be a match for Duckett. A tire impression found near the spot where Teresa’s body was discovered was identical to tires on Duckett’s patrol car.

But the web of circumstantial evidence slowly unraveled.

The 17-year-old girl who testified that she saw Teresa getting into Duckett’s car recanted, saying she was instructed by investigators to lie. The credibility of the FBI analyst who testified about the matching hairs collapsed, along with any faith in hair analysis as a reliable forensic tool. Duckett’s car was known to be onsite after the body was recovered, explaining the tire tracks.

Quest for truth

Multiple attempts were made for a DNA comparison using semen found in Teresa’s underwear. They were inconclusive. One sample remained — the partially degraded slide that can only be tested with modern methods.

If the new lab finds a match, it will allay any fear that Florida may execute an innocent man. If the lab finds the two samples to be a definite mismatch, it will avert an unimaginable error.

Six of the seven Florida Supreme Court justices understood this. Twice, they sent the case back to a Lake County court, but in a ruling Wednesday, Circuit Judge Brian Welke bought into the state’s “inconclusive” label and said there’s nothing more to be done.

That’s baffling. Welke knew the analysis needed to understand the data had not been performed.

Final countdown

On Thursday, the Supreme Court took back the case and set an accelerated schedule for the coming week, when prosecutors and defense attorneys can argue over whether to finish the analysis.

The state will likely try to justify executing Duckett while data that could prove his innocence goes unexamined.

The court should grant enough time to do that analysis — and everyone involved should hope that the Texas lab does not determine that the Deerfield Beach lab mishandled the sample to the point where no results are obtainable.

A final chance for certainty lies with the Supreme Court. Justices must remain loyal to justice and seek the truth — before it’s too late.

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The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

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