Philadelphia City Hall building. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

The Philadelphia court system has announced an agreed-upon protocol allowing for expedited review and potential release of people incarcerated in city jails as a means of combating the looming threat of a coronavirus outbreak in the prison population.

Philadelphia's district attorney and the city's chief public defender, however, aired frustrations at what they see as a slow-moving process that they said was ill-suited to react to the fast-moving spread of the virus.

Court leadership issued a press release Friday announcing it planned to implement new protocols that it said have been agreed upon by both the District Attorney's Office and the Defender Association. The new protocols involve opening four courtrooms in the Stout Center for Criminal Justice so hearings can be conducted telephonically on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and further initially prioritizes motions for release in cases involving economic crimes, cases where the minimum sentencing has already been served, and cases where bail is less than $25,000 and the defendant has no sex, gun, drug or violent offenses.

"The courts will continue to work with all of our judicial partners and the city to ensure public safety—while addressing the unique and pressing challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic," FJD President Judge Idee Fox said.

However, in a joint public meeting held over Zoom on Friday evening, District Attorney Larry Krasner and Chief Public Defender Keir Bradford-Grey expressed frustrations about the protocols, saying they are inadequate in the face of the looming outbreak in the prisons. Specifically, they said court leadership should open more courtrooms and have more judges adjudicating these motions. They also said that protocols were not significantly sweeping, and, while the new rules allow for some classes of defendants to be released without burdensome paper filings, the lengthy motions practice was still needed in too many types of cases.

"The Defender Association of Philadelphia and the District Attorney's Office are glad that the First Judicial District is finally ready to do expedited reviews of specific categories for release from jail," they said in a joint press release issued after the meeting. "But neither the number of cases nor the timeline proposed by the FJD will be enough to significantly reduce the jail population enough to stop the spread of COVID-19 in our jails and prisons."

The district attorney and the chief defender were critical of the court for not moving faster to handle the looming crisis. The courts, on the other hand, have been critical of both the DA's Office and the Defender Association for not turning over comprehensive lists of inmates who should be immediately considered for release. Krasner and Bradford-Grey challenged that characterization during the meeting Friday, saying they had turned over several lists for the court's consideration, allegedly outlining 1,997 cases that could be reviewed.

In an emailed response late Friday, court spokesman Gabriel Roberts said, "With all due respect, while the courts have been waiting some three weeks for the DA's Office to provide a list of specific individuals to review and determine if immediate release is warranted, it should be noted that at any point during these past three weeks, if the court had received such a list, it would have started a review process immediately."

They both said they are continuing to work with the court to continue to develop the protocols to move potential releases faster.

The FJD's announcement comes as inmates across the state have begun falling ill with the coronavirus, which on Sunday led the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections to implement a statewide quarantine of prisoners.

Judges in Pennsylvania have also been agreeing to release some vulnerable and nonviolent inmates in an effort to cut down on crowded conditions. On Tuesday, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania ordered the release of several inmates in the custody of immigration officials, and on Wednesday, an Eastern District judge agreed to release one medically compromised inmate, calling the prisons "tinderboxes for infectious disease."

Some groups, such the ACLU of Pennsylvania, have pushed for the courts to enact more broad-based measures of release. Krasner has been supportive of those measures as well.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Friday, however, rejected a King's Bench petition that the ACLU had brought seeking an emergency release of those at risk of serious illness or death. The ruling, however, ordered president judges to engage with stakeholders to make sure that county correctional facilities are taking steps to address the spread of coronavirus, and to review cases for where the potential release of inmates may be warranted.

During the meeting Friday, both Krasner and Bradford-Grey said they found the Supreme Court's ruling disappointing.