Northern Florida "Rocket Docket" In High Gear As Defenses In Homeowner-Contested Foreclosure Actions Get Flattened & Bulldozed Out Of 'Kangaroo' Court

In Jacksonville, Florida, The Florida Times Union reports:

• The cases go quickly through the conference room on the fifth floor of the Duval County Courthouse. That's where a special foreclosure court has been set up to hear foreclosures and nothing but. With 15,000 open foreclosure cases in Duval County, it's staffed by retired judges with a goal of resolving 25 cases an hour, leading some critics to label it the "Rocket Docket," and there are harsher descriptions as well.

• "The fundamental problem," said Chip Parker, an attorney who specializes in foreclosure defense, "is that for the first time, this court was created with the specific goal of reducing foreclosures 62 percent." "If they find for the defendant, the plaintiffs [usually lenders] just refile," he said. "The only way to reduce [the case load] is to give it to the plaintiff. It's designed with a result in mind, and that's not how justice is supposed to work."

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• The court, like other foreclosure courts in Florida, has harsh critics among some of the attorneys who make regular appearances. Parker said that in the three years before the foreclosure court was established, his firm participated in about 100 hearings for a contested final summary judgment and never lost one. With the new court, they are 1-for-15, winning their first last week in Clay County. "For the first time, they're not even pretending to be unbiased arbiters of justice," Parker said.

For more, see "Rocket Docket" rushing foreclosures, lawyers say (Under pressure to move cases quickly Duval circuit's goal is to resolve 25 per hour).

In related stories, see:

• The New York Times: Florida’s High-Speed Answer to a Foreclosure Mess,
• Naked Capitalism: Florida’s Kangaroo Foreclosure Courts: Judges Denying Due Process on Behalf of Banks.