Out-Of-Control, Rubber-Stamping Jacksonville Judge Featured In Recent Column

In a recent story in Rolling Stone, columnist Matt Taibbi writes about the foreclosure rocket docket in Jacksonville, Florida, and describes his experience observing one hour of court proceedings in one such docket presided over by Judge A.C. Soud.

Mr. Taibbi starts by observing that the rocket docket wasn't created to investigate any of the alleged fraudulent conduct underlying the making and subsequent securitization of the home mortgages that's led to the current mess, but that, according to him:

• It exists to launder the crime and bury the evidence by speeding thousands of fraudulent and predatory loans to the ends of their life cycles, so that the houses attached to them can be sold again with clean paperwork.

He addresses the "public" nature of such proceedings in the following excerpt:

• The hearings, [local foreclosure defense attorneys] said, aren't exactly public. "The judges might give you a hard time about watching," one lawyer warned. "They're not exactly anxious for people to know about this stuff." Inwardly, I laughed at this — it sounded like typical activist paranoia. The notion that a judge would try to prevent any citizen, much less a member of the media, from watching an open civil hearing sounded ridiculous. [*$%&!]-up as everyone knows the state of Florida is, it couldn't be that bad. It isn't Indonesia. Right?
  
  Well, not quite. When I went to sit in on Judge Soud's courtroom in downtown Jacksonville, I was treated to an intimate, and at times breathtaking, education in the horror of the foreclosure crisis, which is rapidly emerging as the even scarier sequel to the financial meltdown of 2008: Invasion of the Home Snatchers II.

Judge Soud, described as a clueless, out-of-control, robo-rubber-stamper who reportedly "told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour" (Taibbi observes that "His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes") does not come out unscathed in this column.

For the column (sprinkled with a few "f-bombs" and other equally indelicate "terms of art"), see Matt Taibbi: Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners (Retired judges are rushing through complex cases to speed foreclosures in Florida).