Judge rejects foreclosures over shoddy paperwork

In most of America these days, foreclosures are rubber-stamped. When a bank wants to foreclose, that's it.

It doesn't matter how much effort a homeowner has made to fulfill payments, or what mistakes the bank has made. When banks want a foreclosure, they get it.

But the New York Times reports that things are a little different in the courtroom of Brooklyn's Justice Arthur Schack.

Schack rejects almost half the foreclosures filed in his court because of the comedies of errors submitted by banks' lawyers and other personnel.

A lot of them are mistakes that you'd think a beginner law student wouldn't make. Some of them are errors that you'd think nobody would make.

For instance, one bank rep signed an affidavit claiming to be the veep of 2 different banks. Also, the bank rep's office was in Missouri, but the signature was notarized in Texas. To top it all off, the bank that filed the claim didn't even own the mortgage to begin with!

Much of the foreclosure paperwork submitted to Schack is full of dumb errors by attorneys that no judge should have to accept.

Did Orly Taitz become a lawyer for the big banks?

A basic rule in Schack's court is: Either the bank proves ownership, or it can't foreclose. Period.

Big banks scoff, but legal experts praise Schack as a national model. One said Schack's rulings are "unusual only because we so rarely hold large corporations to the rules."

If every court held corporations to the rules, almost half the recent foreclosures in America would have never happened.

(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/nyregion/31judge.html)