Earlonne Woods joins a growing group — including ex-judges, a prominent law school dean, a former U.S. cabinet member, a labor leader, and a civil rights activist — calling for Governor Gavin Newsom to nominate Supreme Court Justice Goodwin Liu as California Attorney General if the current AG, Xavier Becerra, is confirmed as President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services.  (Regarding other endorsements, see here and links therein.)  He writes that Liu “is motivated not by politics but by making equal justice under the law a reality for all Californians.”

A couple of things distinguish Woods from Liu’s other admirers.  For one thing, he relates, “I met Justice Liu in 2017 in the media center at San Quentin where I was incarcerated.”  For another, he hosts “Ear Hustle,” a podcast about prison life that was one of three finalists for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting.  (A digression:  one of the two journalists on the audio report that won the Pulitzer was Emily Green, who once covered the California Supreme Court for the Daily Journal.)

Woods explains that he met Liu in prison because Liu takes his staff “to San Quentin every year to meet with prison staff and incarcerated people because he believes decisionmakers should put themselves in close proximity to people impacted by their decisions.”

After Woods had been imprisoned for two decades, then-Governor Jerry Brown commuted Woods’s 31-years-to-life sentence for attempted robbery.  The Supreme Court signed off on the commutation in 2018, consent that is constitutionally required for prisoners convicted of multiple felonies.