News & Commentary written by Andrea Woods

Andrea Woods is a former Staff Attorney with the ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project. She focuses on bail and pretrial justice, seeking to end wealth-based pretrial detention, dramatically reduce our nation’s use of jails, and eliminate the exploitation of people who have been arrested. She has brought challenges to post-arrest systems of incarceration due to inability to pay money bail, inadequate access to public defenders, for-profit pretrial GPS conditions, overbroad systems of pretrial detention, the right of public access to court proceedings, and the extortionate practice of bounty hunting. She also engages in policy advocacy in dozens of states, including on the dangers of pretrial risk assessments. Her work has been featured in the Guardian, the Appeal, CNBC, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Dallas Morning News, and numerous other local news outlets Andrea has worked in public defender offices, the anti-death penalty movement, and with the Innocence Project Northwest as a law student. She was a William H. Gates Public Service Law Scholar at the University of Washington, graduating in 2014. Prior to joining the ACLU, Andrea clerked for the Hon. John C. Coughenour of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.