FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The two prisons that house men on Florida’s death row stand on a pleasant two-lane road that runs past farms and cow pastures about 30 miles north of Gainesville.
Union Correctional Institution and Florida State Prison, low-rise complexes surrounded by fences, razor-wire and flat open fields, are the most likely destinations for Nikolas Cruz if a jury sentences the confessed Parkland school killer to death.
For most of Florida’s 307 death row inmates, who are pursuing appeals that can take a decade or more to inch through the courts, a death sentence means years on death row, with the vast majority of that time spent alone in 6-by-9-foot cells.
