Rubber-Stamping Judges Allow 11th Hour Bank Substitutions, Make Court Docs Confidential In Continuing Effort To Bulldoze Cases Thru F'closure Pipeline

In West Palm Beach, Florida, the Daily Business Review reports:

• Garret Bender and his wife Gina started a court battle more than a year ago against SunTrust Mortgage, which wanted to foreclose on their Delray Beach house to recoup a $4 million mortgage. The Benders asked the 4th District Court of Appeal to intervene last week after they came across what many foreclosure defense attorneys call growing and serious problems in South Florida courts — plaintiff substitutions and the increasing use of confidentiality in foreclosures against a backdrop of the muddled world of securitized mortgages.

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• The Benders filed a petition to quash an order by Palm Beach Circuit Judge Meenu Sasser granting a motion by SunTrust to keep confidential the documents related to the transfer and sale of the Benders’ mortgage. In the petition, the couple also criticized the order that allowed SunTrust to name a new plaintiff to replace itself in the foreclosure action.(1)

• The order granting confidentiality was decided without a hearing and failed to identify the grounds for making the court records confidential, Fort Lauderdale appellate attorney Laura Watson claims in the petition she filed on behalf of the Benders. Watson did not return a call seeking comment by deadline.

• Sasser ordered the documents related to the purchase and servicing of the mortgage be made available to attorneys representing the Benders but otherwise remain confidential. SunTrust claimed in its motion for confidentiality that the documents contained “proprietary commercial information.”

• Florida International University law professor Howard Wasserman said the ruling seems unusual since no hearing was held on the confidentiality motion and the justification for granting confidentiality isn’t detailed in the order. “Ideally, there would be an opportunity for the defense to respond, and you have to have good reason why the records should be confidential,” he said.

For (much) more, see 4th DCA to review sealing of documents in foreclosure case (if link is unavailable, TRY HERE - available online courtesy of Ice Legal).

(1) According to the story, even though rules require substitutions can’t be granted without a hearing, several South Florida judges have been granting the ex parte motions without a hearing, foreclosure defense attorney Carol Asbury said. Attorney Darin Lentner of the Foreclosure Fighters Law Center in Fort Lauderdale said he has been involved in at least 10 cases this year in which lenders switched the plaintiff’s name in the lawsuit, and said he hopes they will eventually be held responsible for their alleged wrongdoing, the story states. “We joke amongst ourselves that there are currently two set of rules — the rules that apply to every other case and the foreclosure case rules, which are being bent, manipulated and violated by lenders, lawyers and the judiciary.