“Because f— that guy,” Jess Nichol recalled telling California Gov. Gavin Newsom inside a San Quentin prison cell last week, describing her initial desire for her sister Polly’s killer to be executed after the 1993 murder, the Los Angeles Times reported.
That unvarnished declaration inside the former death row unit set the stage for an impromptu, roughly 25-minute meeting that became the final piece of a moral puzzle Newsom had been assembling since he was 10, according to reporting. The exchange ultimately helped tip the scales toward Newsom’s controversial decision to grant clemency to the 548 Californians sentenced to capital punishment, changing their terms instead to life without parole.
For Annie Nichol, driving past San Quentin had meant living with a chill of dread, a physical landmark of unimaginable fear. Last week, she and her sister Jess found themselves sitting inside the very death row housing unit where Polly Klaas’s killer once lived, surrounded by fluorescent blue light, a chessboard, and giant green plastic chairs.
“It did not feel good in there,” Annie Nichol told the Los Angeles Times. “It still felt like dark and dank and creepy.”
The meeting happened by chance while all three were in town for the San Quentin Film Festival. Months earlier, the sisters had listened to a podcast featuring Newsom and civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, prompting them to reach out to the governor’s office.
Once inside the transformed facility—which Newsom has spent years remodeling along a European rehabilitation model since placing a moratorium on the death penalty in 2019—they found the governor remarkably open.
When Jess Nichol explained that they still feel anger and grief toward Polly’s killer but believe those feelings shouldn’t determine public policy, Newsom offered a sympathetic response. “Yeah, f— that guy,” Newsom replied, according to Jess Nichol’s account in the Los Angeles Times.
As the conversation wound down, the sisters delivered their direct request. “I said, OK, governor, I want to be direct here,” Jess Nichol told the Los Angeles Times. “We are explicitly asking you to commute all death sentences in California.”
That plea provided the governor with an unexpected release from the heavy emotional burden he had carried from previous encounters with crime survivors, most notably Polly’s father, Marc Klaas. Newsom met with Klaas prior to his 2019 moratorium, an encounter Klaas described as being blindsided and outraged.
On Monday, Klaas told the Los Angeles Times he remains angry and sleepless over the latest unilateral shift in the penal code, stating, “I don’t appreciate my daughter being regurgitated any time somebody wants to make a new unilateral change to the California Penal Code.”
Newsom acknowledged that Klaas’s pain is real and profound, telling the Los Angeles Times that the earlier conversation had long held him back from taking further action. But hearing the opposite perspective directly from Polly’s sisters eliminated any remaining hesitation. “If there was any residual doubt left in terms of doing this, it was eliminated in that moment,” Newsom said.
The governor’s long-standing reservations trace back to his childhood. When he was about 10 years old, his father—a judge—frequented the North Beach Restaurant, where young Gavin sat alongside Pete Pianezzi, a bank robber wrongly convicted of a 1937 double homicide. Newsom’s grandfather and father had fought for years to prove Pianezzi’s innocence, a crusade that eventually led to pardons from governors Pat Brown and Jerry Brown after a gangster-turned-informant confirmed the framing.
Newsom keeps a book about the case, “The Bum Rap Kid,” alongside his death penalty executive order in his desk drawer.
On the same day he met the Nichol sisters, Newsom spoke with an inmate living a few cells away who had just washed his clothes and called his father to describe the simple dignity of wearing fresh, warm socks for the first time in nearly two decades.
For the Nichol sisters, seeing the prison system pivot toward rehabilitation rather than pure vengeance offers a constructive legacy for Polly, whose tragic death previously fueled California’s harsh 1990s three-strikes laws. While the state Supreme Court must still weigh in on the majority of the commutations, the historic policy shift is locked in motion.
“Annie and I will never forget that meeting for the rest of our lives,” Jess Nichol said.
