“We have a testing infrastructure in place and are following the COVID-19 CDC guidelines,” says Maria Finn, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections. “We are confident that any inmate who meets the criteria will be tested.”

Patricia Cummings, who heads the Conviction Integrity Unit in the Philadelphia DA’s Office, is skeptical. “It’s your worst nightmare,” she says. Convicting an innocent man is tragic enough. Much worse would be if, after the state admits the mistake, the inmate were to die while the judicial system ambled to a conclusion. But the current situation is worse yet: Nothing was done to treat this potentially contagious prisoner, even though signs abounded that a viral “bomb” was about to explode, Cummings says. “It seemed like such a conscious indifference to not only Walter Ogrod’s well-being, but everybody in that prison.”

The prison’s decision to forego testing was either lucky or correct. Ogrod has returned to his cell and is recovering. But to Cummings, an equally frightening nightmare could now be unfolding. “How many people did he infect, if in fact he [did] have COVID-19?” she asks. “And are we going to have a widespread pandemic in the prison system?”

Across the country, innocence lawyers are filing emergency petitions to get their clients released from prison before the virus can kill them. In the space of 24 hours, I heard from attorneys representing some two dozen clients in much the same legal position as Ogrod: A trial judge or appellate court had found credible proof of their innocence, their convictions were overturned, and the state was told to release them or give them a new trial. But now they are trapped in prison as their hearings are delayed, prosecutors appeal to higher courts, reviews are stalled, or the decisions sit on the desks of judges who could make the final determination. Attorneys say that hundreds more wrongly convicted people have cases lingering in various stages of litigation; those hearings will go to the back of the line, behind new criminal cases, once courts reopen.

Lawrence Glickman: The conservative case against safety

The coronavirus reveals characteristics of the judicial system that will prove lethal. The virus is lightning fast, while the judicial system is glacially slow. The virus is nimble and opportunistic; the system is ponderous, inflexible in its rules, slow to reverse its mistakes, and quick to attach large punishments to small crimes. Experts say that America will now see the price of mass incarceration, and that it will be catastrophically high, both for people in prisons and for the communities around them.

“Prisons are almost perfectly designed to promote the transmission of communicable disease,” says Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer at New York City’s Rikers Island. Forget about social distancing: Prisoners eat together, use the same showers, work or watch television side by side, and often sleep in the same dorm room with dozens of other inmates. Forget about hygiene: Prisons are “incredibly filthy, unsanitary places,” Venters says, where there’s often no soap, much less the freedom for hand-washing. But what makes prisoners especially vulnerable to this virus is the years of medical neglect. That’s particularly true of those claiming their innocence, who generally spend 10, 20, 30, or 40 years behind bars before they’re vindicated. But Josiah “Jody” Rich, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Brown University, told me that the same applies to most inmates.