Foreclosure-Gate 5.0 :" It aint over till the Fat Cat  Florida"Bankster" Judge sings..."

ACLU Taking Aim at Florida’s Kangaroo Foreclosure Courts

Posted: 07 Apr 2011 12:24 AM PDT

Per Lisa Epstein and April Charney, the ACLU has announced it is contesting the procedures used in Florida’s recently created foreclosure courts:
ACLU Challenges Lack of Due Process in Florida’s “Foreclosure Courts”
What has gone on there is too depressing and pervasive to chronicle on a consistent basis, but we’ve commented on what happens when a state tries to run its courts like a fast food franchise. Consider this discussion from last September:

These new foreclosure-only courts are special creations of the Florida legislature, funded separately from the usual court system. They are manned by retired judges, which means in many cases they are not familiar with real estate law.
But perhaps most important, the explicit objective of these courts is to clear up the backlog. And that is coming to pass not by the Legislature having thrown enough resources at the problem (that is, having greatly enlarged court capacity to process more cases in parallel) but by pushing for faster resolution. The problem is that an accelerated process runs roughshod over due process and allows banks to foreclose when they may not be the right party, or worse, when the foreclosure is the result of servicing error.
Let’s look at one example of banana republic faux justice in the US, via a speech by foreclosure court Judge Roger Colton to his court on how the day was going to go. It’s simply breathtaking. He says that if the bank is foreclosing, he’s not going to consider any evidence that the foreclosure is in error (servicing errors, plaintiff can’t provide proof it owns the note, which means it might not be the right party and procedurally, means it lacks standing to take action). He says he has already heard everything, there is a lot of unemployment in the area; he is going to schedule a court date, but that is merely a deadline for negotiation. In other words, he makes it abundantly clear he has no interest in hearing evidence. When he gets to seeing a defendant after his speech to the court (p. 13), he rubber stamps what the bank wants without even considering the evidence. And apparently his entire day went like that. The summary from an attorney who was representing a client before him that day:

On 8/30, I had a Summary Judgment Foreclosure hearing on Palm Beach County’s “Rocket Docket”. The judge spoke for 14 minutes to the crowd, of mostly pro se defendants, about how they should just agree to the summary judgment and the plaintiffs, (whose attorneys (Shapiro & Fishman had a dedicated courtroom and to whom he referred to as “my attorneys”) would be gracious (Ha!) enough to allow them to stay in their homes for 120 days if needed (even though the statute says he only has to give them 30). When it came to hearing arguments which were fully briefed and provided to the court (pursuant to the instructions of the Divisions head judge) he only allowed 30-60 seconds for argument, failed to read any of the papers, failed to review the plaintiff’s foreclosure package,flatly ignored the Affidavit filed in Opposition, ignored my plea for a trial, signed the judgment and dismissed me. I never was permitted to even read the proposed judgment or to examine the “newly discovered” allonge which Shapiro’s counsel said I had no right to see.

Newly discovered allonges (separate documents with endorsements on them) are fakes; this is the new preferred method of document fabrication. Per the UCC (Uniform Commercial Code), an allonge is to be used ONLY when all the space that could be used for endorsement of a note has been used up. That means margins and the reverse side. And when an allonge is employed, it has to be so firmly attached to the original as to constitute a single document. Hence, no way can it travel separately and suddenly be discovered if it were legitimate.

A minor correction: the new version of the UCC, which has been adopted by most states, does allow for allonges to be used when there is still room on the note. However, they are supposed to be firmly attached. And the idea that the sudden materialization of tons of allonges, when in the past they were almost never used, is a tipoff that they seldom are legitimate.
The irony is that robosigning has taken care of the Florida court docket; many cases have been withdrawn and not refiled as banks try to get a grip on their paperwork. So the ACLU’s might serve to get a now-pointless court system dissolved.
via : Naked Capitalism