It’s a simple question really.
We all know that consumers in this state continue to suffer gross abuses at the hands of the banks and a court system which has largely reached the conclusion that banks must be rewarded with Final Judgments of Foreclosure no matter what the facts. Largely missing from this consideration is the long term and disastrous consequences for the entirety of the judicial system because in order to continue with this madness of providing rewards to the banking institutions in spite of and in the face of their gross misconduct, Florida’s courts are dispensing with due process and ignoring all sense of balance and equal justice under the law.
We see examples of foreclosure fraud everyday. Ignore all Rules of Evidence. Ignore all Rules of Procedure. Ignore all substantive law. Lawyers from any other area of law that have any basic background of evidence would be aghast at the evidence and testimony that bank witnesses are permitted to introduce….testimony and evidence that is nearly entirely devoid of the procedural protections embodied in Rules of Evidence and Procedure. It’s hearsay, there is no basis for authentication, there is no basis for reliability or credibility. Hell, in some cases there is ZERO EVIDENCE AT ALL as occurred to me recently when a judge simply signed a Final Judgment of Foreclosure despite the fact that the bank witness didn’t have a single piece of paper with him in court. No note. No mortgage. No evidence of amounts due and owing…..NOTHING. The judge relied entirely on the lawyer’s statements that all things had been filed and the judge “assumed” that the lawyer was being truthful or had an accurate command of the facts. This is the state of the law here in Florida.
And consumers and foreclosure defense attorneys that dare to raise these issues are viewed as the enemies in this system. I encountered this phenomena just this week when, in the face of gross abuse of court procedures committed by the bank, I became the enemy….I found myself and an attorney in my office under attack in open court. Our transgression? Daring to point out the Rules of Procedure in an effort to protect my client.
Plaintiff filed a case in 2010, they failed to attach not just one, but two mortgage modifications that expressly provided that the documents superseded and replaced the documents that were attached to the complaint. On the eve of trial, the bank dumps 3,028 documents on me…including these modifications that were never disclosed and not part of the complaint. And it took a long, long trial before the court finally granted judgement in our favor. Fighting that hard in the face of such blatant abuse is just wrong.
Attorneys that serve the interests of consumers serve the larger interests of justice, due process, liberty. To see such desecration of all of those crucial concepts just so that banks can get judgments giving them property that they do not want is madness. But that is the state of our country today.
And so finally someone has made a petition to the United States Supreme Court. He will of course not only lose, the case will not even be heard by the United States Supreme Court. It will be thrown out in an instant. Because that too is the state of the law. But at least this attorney has made the effort.
Whether borrowers have the right under the Due
Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to contest
residential foreclosures that use the same fraudulent
documentation numerous branches of the
federal government and 49 state Attorneys General
condemned and prohibited through various multibillion
dollar settlements?
Petition for a Writ of Certiorari (3-4-14)
