For Immediate Release

Tuesday, July 28, 2026

Statement on the Execution of Dominick Occhicone 

STARKE, Fla. — Tonight, We the People of the State of Florida executed 80-year-old Dominick Occhicone for the 1986 murder of his ex-fiancé’s mother, Martha Artzner.  He had received a life sentence for the simultaneous murder of his ex-fiancé’s father, Raymond Artzner. While the murders of the Artzners were tragic, Dominick’s jury was sharply divided over the appropriate punishment, and only a bare majority, 7 of 12 jurors, recommended the death penalty. In no other state in the country, including in present-day Florida, would Dominick have even been eligible for execution.

It would be easy for the stories of Martha and Raymond Artzner to disappear beneath the headlines surrounding today’s unprecedented double execution. We reject that impulse. Martha and Raymond were deeply loved. Their absence has been carried for four decades by family and friends whose grief did not end tonight. Their lives mattered before this case entered a courtroom, and they deserve to be remembered for far more than the way they died.

It is also true that this tragedy did not begin in a vacuum. It unfolded in the long shadow of alcoholism — a medically recognized disease that has left its mark on nearly every family in one way or another. Alcoholism does not excuse violence. It does not erase responsibility. But neither can we pretend it is irrelevant. It is a devastating illness that reaches far beyond the person who suffers from it, distorting judgment, straining families, and leaving behind generations of collateral damage. 

In the years after his conviction, living in forced sobriety and reckoning with the agony he had caused, Dominick Occhicone became an old man. The fierce certainty of youth gave way to the quiet frailty of age. Time, which promises so much and takes everything, reduced him as it reduces us all. He was no longer the man who entered prison in the 1980s. He was an 80-year-old grandfather, physically diminished, walking with difficulty, sustained by the ordinary routines and relationships that make up a human life, even behind prison walls.

Any telling of his life would be incomplete without remarking on the profound strength and comfort he found in his Catholic faith, and from the religious volunteers who regularly ministered to him on death row. He prayed his rosary every single day of his incarceration, and spoke not of how he feared death, but how he rejoiced in knowing what was to come next.

So too would it be incomplete without telling the story of his family. While on death row, Dominick learned he had fathered two daughters, in addition to his son who was living with him at the time of his arrest. That son suffered from his father’s alcoholism, his crimes, and his absence, and became a part of the all-too-American cycle of generational illness and incarceration. Even beneath that long shadow, he loved his father and did not want to see him executed, yet rules barring communication between prisoners denied them the chance to say one final goodbye. Tonight, he sits in a cell in the same town where, in a matter of days, his father’s body will be taken for cremation.

One of Dominick’s daughters only learned who her biological father was 15 years ago, and at first struggled with the knowledge that the man who had given her life had taken two others. Yet, over time, the two developed a relationship, and she came to know him for more than the terrible violence he committed in an alcohol-fueled rage 40 years ago. He met his grandchildren, and they played cards on visitation days. He never failed to send a birthday or holiday card. He tried as best he could to be the father he never was. 

Some might say that transformation doesn’t matter, that decades of aging, reflection, remorse, and humanity are beside the point. They might demand that a person be frozen forever at the worst moment of his life, regardless of everything that follows. But human beings are not statues. We are not the single worst thing we have ever done. We change. We weaken. We reconcile. We seek forgiveness. We become dependent on the kindness of others. We become old.

Tonight’s execution leaves behind its own circle of grief. It leaves more children and grandchildren who have to bury someone they love. It leaves correctional officers, medical personnel, spiritual advisors, attorneys, and witnesses who were asked to participate in an act that can never be undone. It leaves communities wondering what was healed by the State killing an elderly man whose death sentence itself reflected a deeply divided jury. Like every execution, it created new wounds while claiming to close old ones.

Tonight, Florida ended the life of an old man whose death sentence would not be permitted anywhere in America today – not even here. Raymond and Martha Artzner remain gone. Their loved ones continue to carry an immeasurable loss. And now another family has joined the ranks of those left to grieve.

Dominick’s execution capped a macabre day in the State of Florida. Two men put to death by the same execution team, on the same gurney. That much death inside one room – whether participating in it or witnessing it – causes damage that cannot be undone. When this state-sanctioned killing spree finally ends, we will be left to reckon with the people it required us to become.