Time For Careful Examination of Florida’s Constitutionally Underfunded Court System

On June 30, 2015, the money appropriated by the Florida Legislature to address the backlog of foreclosure cases in Florida will be depleted, the judicial and legislative policy makers will declare that the “crisis” is over and life for attorneys, litigants and judges who practice in this area of our legal system will return to practicing under more normalized conditions.

But now that the Mission is Accomplished, we should all take time to carefully consider what has occurred because this has been a very dark chapter in the history of our state’s judicial system. Let’s start with some basics. It is undisputed that the plaintiffs who filed hundreds of thousands of foreclosure cases in courtrooms all across this state engaged in conduct that ranged from inappropriate to outright fraudulent and maybe even criminal.

The out of court conduct, the document fabrication, the forgery, the fraud was the foundation for what became the grossly improper in court conduct, the witness coaching and the perjury.  All of this was wrapped up and admitted in the Pandora’s Box known as the National Mortgage Settlement. It must be remembered that the money paid by the banks was in fact that money that Florida used to fund the Rocket Docket. No sense belaboring the point anymore that this money was required to be used to “help” consumers when in fact what it actually did was “help” the banks with senior judges, staff people and fancy new computers that were used to more efficiently chop through the foreclosure backlog.

One more staggering and absolutely undeniable example of the gross unfairness that continues to exist in foreclosure courts (remember, funded by bank misconduct) has been nearly unilateral devotion of taxpayer dollars (or the fines paid by the banks) to court processes that favor only the plaintiffs. I’m talking specifically about the fact that courts devote nearly unlimited resources to setting foreclosure summary judgments and trials (which events are designed to uniformly benefit the banks) while courts refuse to provide anywhere near the same amount of resources to addressing defendant issues like discovery.

This has all been very shameful, and very dangerous.  Now that it’s behind us it’s time for the whole of this community, attorneys, judges, consumers to take a long and hard look at the dangers to the judicial system as a whole that have been exhibited by this dark period in our court’s history.

A most critical issue that has not gone away, and that frankly is only getting worse,

FLORIDA’S ENTIRE COURT SYSTEM IS FUNDED BY LESS THAN 1% OF THE STATE BUDGET

FLORIDA’S COURT SYSTEM IS CONSTITUTIONALLY UNDERFUNDED

https://mattweidnerlaw.com/floridas-court-system-is-underfunded-and-the-result-hurts-us-all/