I’ve spent years hurling very serious allegations at the plaintiff in a foreclosure case. After many years and untold dozens of motions, the plaintiff could no longer ignore my allegations and instead took a voluntary dismissal yesterday.
The most infuriating thing is that because of the Florida Supreme Court’s decision in Bank of New York v. Pino, the banks now have free reign to commit the most egregious ethical violations but then throw up their hands, shrug their shoulders and say, “So What?”
Almost worse than that is the fact that what the court has done…starting directly at the Florida Supreme Court and now percolating all the way down to trial courts…is encourage foreclosing plaintiffs to engage in improper conduct. We’re seeing more and more of this as the “easy” cases are concluded and now we’re left with the real ones that have heavy lifting and real problems.
This is the thing that really bothers me the most. “Our” court system has been an active participant in systematically supporting a grave decline in professionalism and the integrity of the judicial system….it happens every single time judges turn the other way when presented with examples of failure to follow the rules or worse, engage in intentional misconduct….and there’s much more of that which is coming to the surface now…..
Here are excerpts from the pleadings:
A trial in this foreclosure case was heard before Senior Judge Wayne L. Cobb on September 17, 2014. On November 12, 2014, Judge Cobb entered his Uniform Final Judgment of Foreclosure and his Supplemental to Final Judgment of Foreclosure. The Defendant timely filed his Motion for Rehearing and requesting that the Final Judgment be vacated on November 27, 2014. Judge Cobb entered his Order Denying Rehearing April 01, 2015. Defendant files this Motion to Vacate, and alerts this court that this Motion should be heard no later than thirty (30) days from the date of rendition of the Rehearing Order because if this motion is not granted, Defendant must file his Notice of Appeal which will divest the court of jurisdiction upon filing. Your undersigned counsel respectfully asserts that the serious wrong done to the defendant in a court in this community should be reversed by the court in his community, without the need to go outside the community to the appellate court.
Stated plainly and most directly, the Final Judgment in this case must be vacated because it is not clear that Plaintiff’s counsel engaged in serious misconduct both before and during the trial, and that testimony elicited by Plaintiff’s counsel and their witness during trial was false, misleading and potentially perjury. Specifically, after trial your undersigned discovered that counsel for Plaintiff issued two (2) subpoenas to non parties, thereafter obtained hundreds of pages of documents from those non parties, then presented those documents as the business records of her witness during trial.
After trial, your undersigned received those documents (more than 200 pages) from the non party, CitiMortgage. Upon receipt, your undersigned carefully compared the testimony of plaintiff against the improperly obtained documents and it became very clear that the testimony of the witness during trial was not at all truthful. Specifically, over and over again, Plaintiff’s witness asserted that it “boarded” the loan documents shortly after it began servicing the loan in 2012. Critically however, the documents it introduced at trial as its own documents show that they were generated and produced on September 17, 2014, just 9 days before trial. Moreover, the documents that were introduced by plaintiff were in exactly the same format and page number as the documents that were provided to defendant by the third party.
This witness was not a low level trial witness brought in to testify perfunctorily in foreclosure cases, but rather he was, “A senior vice president and associate general counsel” who “managed all of the default foreclosure litigation in the country.” (Transcript of Trial Before Judge WayNE Cobb [T. ___] at 26). The position and experience of the witness in this case is critically important for this court to consider given the very serious allegations that your undersigned counsel has leveled against both the witness and his attorneys.
And Then This Set Of Facts:
This court is by now well acquainted with the serious allegations of wrongdoing that have been leveled at Plaintiff and its attorneys for more than a year. This court will recall that Plaintiff’s own counsel filed ITS own “Motion to Vacate Final Judgment” and in that motion asserted, “this matter has been mired in litigation and allegations of misconduct.” This court will further recall that since he discovered the wrongdoing of Plaintiff and their counsel nearly a year ago, undersigned counsel has filed nearly dozens of motions and pleadings and have sent untold dozens of very detailed emails and correspondence which very clearly and specifically articulate the wrongdoing of Plaintiff and their counsel. It should be noted that after more than a year of litigating this issue, neither Plaintiff nor their counsel have ever disputed undersigned counsel’s very serious allegations of wrongdoing. In fact, in the last motion filed by Plaintiff, by their newly substituted counsel, Plaintiff now admits what has been clear for more than a year.
