Florida executed former police officer James Duckett by lethal injection on July 28, nearly 39 years after he raped and murdered 11-year-old Teresa McAbee while on duty — and the only reason it took this long is that the system gives child-killers endless avenues to delay the reckoning they earned.
Duckett wasn't just a killer. He was a killer with a badge. McAbee was last seen alive in his patrol car in May 1987, an evening when he was the only officer working the streets of Mascotte, Florida. Her body showed she'd been sexually assaulted, strangled, and drowned, according to court records. Fingerprint and DNA evidence tied Duckett to the crime so tightly that even the most determined defense couldn't explain it away. He was fired and arrested within months.
But the system — the same system that swore an oath to protect girls like Teresa — then spent nearly four decades letting Duckett's lawyers run the clock. Appeals, motions, procedural obstacles. Every delay was another day a child-killer breathed air his victim couldn't.
Here's the part that should make every American's blood run cold. Four months after Duckett murdered McAbee, 14-year-old Jeanifer Weldon disappeared while walking home carrying a stuffed kitten she'd bought that day. Her skeletonized remains were found about two weeks later behind tall grass off a rural road. Investigators believe Duckett used his old law enforcement uniform to convince Weldon he was someone she could trust — a cop, a safe ride home. She was strangled. Investigators suspect she was raped before her death.
Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd confirmed that authorities believe Duckett killed Weldon too. But they deliberately chose not to pursue that conviction. Why? Because adding charges could "jam up" the execution process, Judd told reporters on July 30. It could "create more defense, or more arguments, or more excuses why he shouldn't be executed." So prosecutors had to strategically abandon a second child's justice to ensure the first sentence wasn't derailed by more legal games.
Think about that. The procedural system is so broken that prosecutors must choose between full accountability for a monster and the risk that holding him fully accountable gives him more tools to escape punishment entirely. That isn't justice. That's a maze designed by and for the legal class, not for the families waiting for closure.
Both families attended Duckett's execution at Florida State Prison in Raiford. McAbee's family and Weldon's family, united by grief, finally watched the man who destroyed their daughters pay the ultimate price. No activist group issued apologies for the years they spent fighting to spare him. No retractions from the defense bar for the procedural stalling that forced prosecutors to strategically ignore one girl's murder to secure justice for another.
The death penalty worked. It just took 39 years and a strategic surrender on one child's case to get there. The question that ought to haunt every lawmaker: how many more killers are still gaming that same broken clock right now?
