For years after her sister Polly Klaas was murdered and the killer incarcerated on death row at San Quentin, Annie Nichol viewed the prison with dread, a place that contained the living embodiment of her unimaginable pain and fear.
“Every time I drove by San Quentin, I would kind of get a chill,” Nichol told me Sunday. “It felt scary.”
Last week, Nichol found herself not just inside that prison, but inside the death row unit where Polly’s killer once lived, inside a cell that had not long ago housed other murderers — sitting with her sister Jess Nichol and Gov. Gavin Newsom during an impromptu meeting that the women had never imagined would happen there.
Despite the unease of the setting, the conversation would lead Newsom to last week’s controversial decision to grant clemency to the 548 Californians sentenced to capital punishment, changing their terms instead to life without parole (the state Supreme Court still needs to weigh in on the majority of cases).
For all the public discussions about Newsom’s move, the roughly 25 private minutes he spent with the Nichol sisters was the final piece of a moral puzzle he’s been working on since he was 10, he told me — an unlikely journey that involves a mafia hit, a member of Polly’s family who opposes his decision, and warm socks.
Yes, socks.
But first, the cell.
In 2019, Newsom put a moratorium on the death penalty and began remaking San Quentin following a European model of incarceration that stresses rehabilitation. Death row, a cavernous hull of a building with multiple stories of concrete cells reaching up toward a ceiling so decrepit that birds roosted inside, was transformed.
Annie and Jess found themselves sitting inside a space that was once two cells, and now has a chess board and giant green plastic chairs. Fluorescent lights seeped everything in a cold blue glow.
“It did not feel good in there,” Annie said. “It still felt like dark and dank and creepy.”
The sisters had never met Newsom, and Newsom didn’t know anything about their opposition to the death penalty, he said. He did know Polly’s father, Marc Klaas, however. Klaas does not like Newsom.
Before Newsom announced his moratorium, he met with Klaas and a group of crime survivors. Klaas said then that he felt blindsided and outraged, and became “viscerally angry” during the meeting.
Monday, Klaas told me he’s angry all over again and can’t sleep.
“I don’t appreciate my daughter being regurgitated any time somebody wants to make a new unilateral change to the California Penal Code,” he said.
Newsom has spoken about his meeting with Klaas in the intervening years. Monday, he called it an “indelible conversation” that has held him back from taking further action on the death penalty.
“His pain is real,” Newsom said. “I have an abundance of respect for his point of view.”
And then he met Jess and Annie Nichol. The sisters had listened to a podcast that Newsom did with civil rights lawyer and anti-death-penalty advocate Bryan Stevenson months earlier and reached out to his office to ask if they could meet. They didn’t hear back until last week, when all three were planning to be in town for the San Quentin Film Festival.
The decision to gather in a cell was made on the fly, they said. But once inside, they found the governor to be “surprisingly emotionally available and curious and interested,” Jess said. “It felt like he wasn’t wearing his governor’s mask. Actually, it felt like a real moment of humanity.”
Newsom asked if they had always been against the death penalty, and Jess told him that in the beginning, after Polly’s death in 1993, they wanted the killer executed. “We thought that was justice,” she said. “Because f— that guy. And that’s what I said, for real.”
Newsom’s reponse? “Yeah, f— that guy,” she recalls him saying.
“It felt important that he understand that we haven’t forgiven the man who killed Polly,” Jess said. “We still feel anger and grief, but we just believe that those feelings, however understandable, shouldn’t determine public policy.”
But as the meeting wound down, the sisters realized they had forgotten the most important part — the ask.
“I said, OK, governor, I want to be direct here,” recalled Jess. “We are explicitly asking you to commute all death sentences in California.”
Newsom said that request, hearing it from Polly’s sisters, along with the plea that he give it equal weight to anything else that had been said by other crime survivors, was an intense moment for him — providing an unexpected emancipation from the emotions he had been carrying from his interaction with Marc Klaas.
“If there was any residual doubt left in terms of doing this, it was eliminated in that moment,” Newsom said.
Jess said it was clear to her that Newsom has been “wrestling with this for a long time, even since his childhood.”
When Newsom was about 10, he told me, he remembers sitting inside North Beach Restaurant in San Francisco. It’s an old-school, white tablecloth joint his father — a judge and a lion in Newsom’s memories — frequented. This day, Newsom recalls being joined by Pete Pianezzi, a former bank robber wrongly convicted of a 1937 Los Angeles double homicide.
Newsom’s grandfather, William Newsom II, and later his father, William Newsom III, were convinced of Pianezzi’s innocence and fought for years to help him gain a pardon and an exoneration (which he eventually did, from Gov. Pat Brown and then Gov. Jerry Brown, respectively). The Newsoms were right — a gangster-turned-informant confirmed Pianezzi had been framed by the mob.
Newsom said Pianezzi’s tale is what started him thinking about the death penalty — Pianezzi had escaped a capital sentence because a single juror refused it on moral grounds.
Pianezzi’s story was turned into a book, “The Bum Rap Kid,” and Newsom keeps a copy of it, along with the executive order pausing the death penalty, in the top drawer of his desk — “a reminder of why I’m here,” he said.
He sees the issue of the death penalty as part of a “deeper narrative” about criminal justice that has been central to his time in office.
Which brings us to the socks.
On the same day Newsom met the Nichol sisters, he spoke with an inmate who lives a few cells away from where they met. The guy had washed his clothes that day and called his father to tell him how it felt to have on fresh, warm socks for the first time in almost 20 years — the laundry facilities are new, part of that remodel of space and ideas that Newsom has championed. That conversation stuck with Newsom, too.
Newsom has been remaking our prison system to acknowledge the reality that the vast majority of people in prison are getting out one day. They will be in your communities, maybe even be your neighbors. Ask yourself this — what makes you safer? A rage-filled neighbor with no job or social skills, or an employed guy who knows how to take care of himself?
Appreciating warm socks is a little dose of civilization. Teaching people how to be civilized, one sock at a time, makes us all safer.
For the Nichol sisters, that vision of public safety — one that invests in survivors over punishment, and one that prioritizes changing outcomes for those inside and outside of prison — is ultimately what their opposition to the death penalty is about.
Knowing that their conversation with Newsom was so pivotal in his decision was shocking, they both said, and the entire event seems “surreal,” Jess said. But the result is what they see as a new legacy for Polly.
Her death became the impetus for California’s harsh three-strikes laws, which led to the over-incarceration of Black and brown people, often for minor crimes. The clemency, the Nichol sisters said, changes that.
“Annie and I will never forget that meeting for the rest of our lives,” Jess said.
For Newsom, the commutations seem, to me anyway, like the final act of his criminal justice reform, an overlooked and misunderstood legacy whose effectiveness won’t be known for years to come. But one he’s willing to take a risk on.
Newsom told me one of the worst moments of his political career — when he got caught during the COVID-19 pandemic at a fancy Napa Valley restaurant — was actually “the best thing that ever happened” to him because it reminded him of the responsibility he has to his power, and how fleeting that power is.
That’s the lesson he learned in North Beach, at a table with a felon and his father. And when it comes to how he feels about the fallout from this decision, whatever it may be, a text from his sister summed up what he’ll carry as its legacy: “Dad would be proud.”
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