The District Attorney’s Office and the Defender Association are urging the courts to move faster as all three attempt to expedite the release of qualifying inmates to mitigate the impact of the coronavirus on the city’s jail population.

On Friday, the First Judicial District announced it would begin expediting reviews of inmates for potential release to begin Tuesday of next week. However, this is at least four days too late, according to District Attorney Larry Krasner and Chief Defender Kier Bradford-Grey.

“We were ready to begin working today,” Krasner said during a Friday evening teleconference. “We let them know that we were willing to work on Saturday, Sunday, Monday in order to get this moving. Every day that we are not working to reduce the jail population to make it safer in terms of social distancing more people are exposed to the coronavirus.”

On Friday the city announced 31 inmates in city jails have tested positive for coronavirus, which has been classified by the World Health Organization as a global pandemic.

The two agencies are also critical of the caseload that the courts intend to take on beginning on Tuesday saying it is not aggressive enough. The courts plan to designate four courtrooms for three days to hearings before the city’s Municipal Court and Court of Common Pleas. The hearings will be vetted by both prosecutors and public defenders.

“We need more judges working in order to expedite cases,” Bradford-Grey said. “We are literally in a life or death situation, not just for our clients, but for the people who work inside our prison system and their families. This is to make the prisons safer for both the inmates and prison employees.”

On Friday the First Judicial District announced it would fast-track inmates convicted of economic crimes, those who have already completed their minimum sentence, and cases in which bail is less than $25,000 where the inmate has no prior record of violent crime, gun, drug or sex offenses.

Bradford-Grey and Krasner’s office have countered with other recommendations that include expediting the release of those held on technical violations of probation, those with less than six months remaining on their sentence, and those 55 and older who have underlying health conditions that make them particularly vulnerable to getting sick.

Bradford-Grey said her and Krasner’s offices have recommended doing away with the current process of filing paper motions in favor of forming teams of attorneys and judges who can review the parole, bail and detainer motions simultaneously to expedite the release of those who are eligible.

“We’re in an unprecedented emergency that requires progressive, unprecedented solutions,” Bradford-Grey said. “We are well past ideological debates over who does or does not deserve to be in prison.”

The DA and the Defender Association said they have provided a list to the courts of 1,197 inmates that they believe are eligible for release. This was in contrast to a statement released earlier in the day by Municipal Court President Judge Patrick Dugan, who said he had not yet received the list.Earlier Friday in a prepared statement, Municipal Court President Judge Patrick Dugan said the courts have sought for weeks and agreed upon a list of inmates for review for possible release but added “that the courts continue to await the list of specific cases for reviews.”

Bradford-Grey and Krasner pointed to other jurisdictions where the courts have been closed as long as the city’s (March 17), where the inmate populations have fallen, such as Kentucky, which they say has seen a 28 percent drop state-wide in the city jail inmates.

“We have to be more aggressive about this here,” said Krasner, adding that Philadelphia has seen just a 5% reduction in its jail population since the courts were closed on March 17. “Our efforts to do this in a sweeping and efficient fashion have been frustrating.”