Fulton County’s public defenders have asked a judge to release 183 inmates being held simply because they can’t afford bail.
An emergency habeas petition filed Tuesday in Fulton Superior Court says the alleged offenders -- who are awaiting trial -- face “extraordinary physical danger posed by their confinement during the pendency of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
So far Fulton has granted 64 early releases following consideration of eligible inmates by the sheriff’s office, said spokeswoman Tracy Flanagan. An additional 37 people were granted signature bonds by Chief State Court Judge Fred Eady in collaboration with the county solicitor, Flanagan said.
Most of those came in late March. Early releases have since slowed to a trickle.
“We are terribly concerned at the speed the process is moving,” said Sarah Geraghty, an attorney for the Southern Center for Human Rights. The center filed an amicus brief in support of the public defenders’ petition.
Geraghty said an additional 279 inmates are being detained in Fulton for misdemeanor offenses.
“The jail’s detainees and officers live and work under conditions that are often unsanitary and sometimes, in the words of a judge last year, ‘repulsive,’” the amicus brief states. “Even in normal times, these conditions push the limits of what the Constitution tolerates. In the context of the current health crisis, however, conditions in the jail go well beyond any arguable constitutional line.”
The main jail, on Rice Street, currently holds 2244 offenders. Another 207 are incarcerated at the South Jail Annex in Union City, a female-only facility. Altogether the jails are about 400 people shy of normal capacity, Flanagan said.
Altogether 18 inmates have tested positive. Six have recovered, and Flanagan said the prognosis is encouraging for the 12 inmates still being treated at the jail.
“No one has a fever,” she said.
Those totals have seemingly plateaued after a rash of infections at the end of March, including one 24-hour period in which nine inmates tested positive for COVID-19
Activists say it’s all but certain many more inmates have been infected.
“The numbers of people diagnosed reflect only a portion of those infected,” states the habeas petition. “Very few people have been tested, and some are asymptomatic transmitters. Thousands of people are carrying a potentially fatal disease that is easily transmitted -- and few are aware of it.”
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A leading expert on infectious diseases recently told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution the county needed to reduce its population at the main jail to about 1500 persons, which necessitate the release of more than 700 inmates.
“This is a preventable disaster that can be avoided, but only by acting with extreme speed, said Robert Greifinger, who served as medical monitor during the federal government’s 11-year oversight of the Fulton jail ending in 2015.
A failure to act would “overwhelm the county’s available hospital and intensive care beds,” Greifinger warned.
Those warnings have largely gone unheeded. As the infection rate has seemingly stalled so, too, has the urgency to create more space within the jail.
That’s led to a rising level of panic among those left inside, Geraghty said.
“A global pandemic calls for a more significant response than what we’ve seen so far,” she said.
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