There’s a place in our society that holds a different breed of men. They are prisoners, true; but they are not the normal breed of arsonist, rapist, thief, junkie, or killer. These are men (statistically almost exclusively men) who have not only been determined to have killed with premeditation and received the charge of “Murder One,” but they also failed the HAC test, which allows the judge to sentence them to death. In other words, their crimes are considered to be somehow worse than “ordinary” murder: these transgressions are Heinous, Atrocious or Cruel (HAC).
This place is Death Row, and among such places, the Union Correctional Institution in Florida holds a particularly dastardly reputation—as do the men who inhabit the steel-and-concrete cages.
