Even a global pandemic can’t cause the wheels of justice to grind to a complete halt.

On Tuesday, defence lawyer Megan Savard sat behind the wheel of her silver Mazda parked on an Etobicoke street, computer on her lap, as she read into her monogrammed cellphone a list of proposed bail conditions for her client who, at that moment, was in custody across the city in a Scarborough police station.

Faced with a near-complete shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic — and the reality that people still commit crimes — the justice system is discovering new ways to keep functioning, such as conducting routine hearings by phone.

“It’s just an illustration of how possible it is for us to do these things remotely,” Savard told the Star after the virtual bail hearing ended and her client, who had been arrested for breaching a bail condition related to a domestic assault charge, was ordered released.

Also participating in the teleconference were the Toronto police officer in charge of the man, his proposed surety, who listened in from a parking lot outside the station, and a Crown attorney who dialed in from another location.

They would all normally have appeared inside courtroom 405 at the 1911 Eglinton Avenue East courthouse, where a justice of the peace and a court clerk also joined in via speakerphone.

Only a day earlier, that courthouse was on lockdown after a prosecutor was diagnosed as a presumed positive case of COVID-19.

Savard is a Criminal Lawyers’ Association representative at the Scarborough courthouse who, like other CLA members, had been volunteering her time during the COVID-19 crisis. She worked with police and prosecutors in Scarborough to develop a protocol to help maintain the rights of men and women accused of crimes while also containing the spread of COVID-19 by limiting unnecessary human contact, such as from transporting the accused to court.

For now, this remote bail hearing project includes only “consent releases,” which happen when the prosecutor has agreed to the release of a prisoner. Savard would like to see the project expand to contested bail hearings at all Toronto courthouses, where all but emergency matters have been postponed access has been restricted to the public.

So much depends on having the co-operation of everyone involved, particularly the police, she said — and in Scarborough “they’ve been great.”

On Tuesday, Savard called in from her car because she had been running errands before non-essential businesses were set to close hours later. She said she has also recently conducted in-custody bail hearings from her living room couch — and from the passenger seat of a car inching its way through a Tim Horton’s drive-thru.

Bail hearings, even those conducted remotely, still involve a three-part test: That an accused person won’t run away, that they won’t commit more crimes, and that his or her release is not contrary to the public interest, called the “tertiary ground.”

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Savard said she and her colleagues are finding “the tertiary ground now favours release,” because the public can appreciate the desire to keep people out of jails, which are a high-risk environment for an outbreak.

The higher courts have sent that signal. Last week, in a bail review teleconference in Superior Court at 361 University Avenue, a judge released a 20-year-old alleged drug trafficker, writing in her decision: “the risks to health from this virus in a confined space with many people, like a jail, are significantly greater than if a defendant is able to self-isolate at home.

“The virus is clearly easily transmitted, absent strong social distancing or self-isolation, and it is clearly deadly to a significant number of people who it infects. The practical reality is that the ability to practice social distancing and self-isolation is limited, if not impossible, in an institution where inmates do not have single cells.”

Still, Savard said, the public should not be alarmed that everyone arrested is going to walk free.

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“No one is treating this lightly,” she said.

“We’re trying to ensure that low-risk and non-violent people are released, and maybe erring a little bit more on the side of release in those grey area cases — but the dangerous people are staying in custody, as they need to, unfortunately.”