TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office said “stay tuned” when asked if a new death warrant would be signed for a former police officer from Lake County who had been scheduled to be executed on March 31.
With its own stay on the execution holding, the Florida Supreme Court last week set a Wednesday deadline for briefs to be submitted in a request for an independent analysis of DNA test results.
The timeline for the briefs goes one day beyond the period set for James Aren Duckett’s execution in the warrant DeSantis signed on Feb. 27.
When asked about another warrant being signed, Molly Best, a spokeswoman for DeSantis, replied in an email on Monday, “Stay tuned!”
Duckett’s warrant was the fifth DeSantis signed this year. He has since signed two others.
[WATCH: DNA testing in James Duckett murder case inconclusive]
Duckett, 68, a former Mascotte police officer convicted of the rape and murder of 11-year-old Teresa McAbee in 1987, was scheduled to be executed at Florida State Prison on March 31. The warrant set April 7 as the latest date for the execution.
However, the majority of the court concurred in the request for a stay on March 26, partly because Duckett awaited postconviction DNA testing, which the court noted he claimed will “provide newly discovered evidence of his actual innocence.”
DNA Labs International was selected to conduct the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) test of a sample located on McAbee’s jeans. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement announced on March 27 that the testing was inconclusive.
Duckett argued for further testing by Orthram Inc., which his defense hired to analyze the data.
Last Wednesday, a circuit judge in Lake County denied Duckett’s request for further DNA data from the recent test.
In his order, Judge Brian Welke noted the Supreme Court’s stay of execution “does not indicate any testing beyond what was already ordered by this court. The results of the testing have now been reported, and no further testing remains to be done, nor is further testing possible.”
Welke added that further testing would not “would not generate new evidence on which the defendant’s actual evidence claim could rest.”
In a motion to maintain the stay, Duckett’s attorney Mary Elizabeth Wells argued they weren’t seeking additional testing, but a “qualified lab that can answer the question once and for all whether Mr. Duckett is guilty of this crime.”
The court required all briefs on the request to be submitted by the end of Wednesday.
In its motion Thursday to vacate the stay, the state indicated it believed the calculations from the SNP DNA results leaned toward further linking Duckett to the death.
“Regardless of the exact figure, there is no new evidence of innocence based on these DNA results,” the state argued on Thursday. “There is only new evidence of his guilt. The statistical calculations would merely establish the strength of that new evidence of his guilt. The current SNP DNA results are ‘definitive’ in the sense that matters legally to a claim of innocence. The results do not exonerate him.”