Judge Kiboshes Foreclosure Action; Says He Was BS'd By Dubious Paperwork Filed By Loan Servicer, Foreclosure Mill Law Firm

In Northeast Florida, The Florida Times Union reports:

• Changing stories about who owns a mortgage and seemingly fresh evidence from a long-closed bank led a judge to throw out a foreclosure lawsuit in St. Johns County. It’s the second time in as many months that Circuit Judge J. Michael Traynor has dismissed with prejudice a foreclosure case where homeowners disputed who owns the mortgage.

• Lawyers representing New York-based M&T Bank gave three separate accounts of the ownership, with documentation that kept changing, before Traynor tossed the case Friday . “The court has been misled by the plaintiff from the beginning,” the judge wrote in his order. He added that documents filed by M&T’s lawyers seemed to contradict each other and “have changed as needed to benefit the plaintiff.”

• The latest account was that another bank, Wells Fargo, owned the note, and M&T was a servicer, a company paid to handle payments and other responsibilities tied to a mortgage. To believe that, the judge wrote, the “plaintiff is asking the court to ignore the documents filed in the first two complaints.” He added that Wells Fargo can still sue on its own, if it has evidence that it owns the mortgage.

• Traynor has scheduled a hearing in August for lawyers from the Law Offices of Marshall C. Watson, a Fort Lauderdale-based firm, to explain the evidence they presented before deciding whether he should impose sanctions on either them or the bank. Attorneys at the Watson firm referred questions [to] a supervising attorney who didn’t respond to messages left by phone and email. Traynor wrote he would have questions about a document that was presented unfinished in court last year, then shown again this year carrying the stamp of the First National Bank of Nevada, which the federal government closed two years ago.

• More and more foreclosure cases are being argued on shaky evidence, said James Kowalski, a Jacksonville attorney who represented homeowners Lisa and Larry Smith in the fight over their oceanfront home on Anastasia Island. “I think it’s very representative of what the banks and their lawyers are currently doing in court,” Kowalski said. He said lawyers bringing the lawsuits are often pressed by their clients to close the cases quickly. But it’s up to lawyers to present solid evidence and arguments. “We are supposed to be better than that,” Kowalski said. “We are supposed to be officers of the court. ...We are supposed to be protectors of justice, not simply aiding and abetting a servicer who is trying to hurry something through.”

Source: Judge dismisses St. Johns foreclosure suit (Documents provided by M&T Bank contradicted each other, he said.).

In a related post, see Schmaper/Paper -- It's Just A Foreclosure, Your Honor.