Your first sentence is not an accurate description of what he is doing. Shocked there. He is not, and cannot, determine who is or is not “innocent.” The property owners will, often as not, be the “innocent” parties. If he, on his off hours, worked with an agency to assist the “innocent” renters, or a program to make sure the required notices in dispossessory actions were actually done, he would likely do a lot more real good and he would be a “hero.” Sitting down on the job and assuming the position of the court does not make one a hero. Similarly, when one hires a lawyer they want one who actually focuses on the law and what can be accomplished for the client. Not one who simply parrots, or cuts and pastes the “consumers rights” rants to get more clients in the door.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE SAY THANK YOU TO SHERIFF DART FOR BEING THE ONLY ONE OF THE FEW TO STAND UP TO WASHINGTON AND THE GLOBAL BANKERS!

http://www.cookcountysheriff.org

sheriff@cookcountysheriff.org

PaulMac - thanks for commenting. It always amuses me when people come to the “South Carolina Bankruptcy & Consumer Law Blog” - run by two consumer bankruptcy attorneys - and are surprised when they find out we’re advocates for the consumer. If you expected me to take the IBA’s side, well - that’s just silly. I do have a position, and an opinion, and that’s not something for which I feel any need to apologize. You’ve got it quite backwards: I don’t advocate for consumers to get them in the door. They come through the door because they know I’m their advocate.

As for your “shock” that anyone would call the tenants “innocent”: Renters who are not responsible for the payment of the mortgage are, by definition, innocent in the context of a foreclosure on the house. What would you expect the tenant to do? He or she gets no notice of the foreclosure; he or she has no ability or legal obligation to make any kind of payment on the underlying note (or ability to do so even if she or he DID get notice, in all likelihood). Rather, they come home from work one day and find their belongings tossed on the front lawn.

Read the post again. Read the CNN article again, PaulMac. Hopefully you just jumped to a conclusion that the people he’s choosing not to evict are the owners who are responsible for the nonpayment of the mortgage. If you didn’t make that mistake - if you KNEW that these were people who had NO obligation or right, for that matter, to keep the building out of foreclosure in the first place … well, you’re just in the wrong place altogether.

Take care.

This sheriff deserves to be applauded for taking a stand for what he thinks is right. It’s an extremely tough position he is, but faced with this moral dilemma he’s standing up for what he believes in which should be commended. At a minimum his actions raised awareness to the situation and I think much good wil eventually come from that - and that’s probably what he intended from the start.

[...] wrote here about Tom Dart earlier - the Cook County sheriff who refused to carry out foreclosure evictions against tenants [...]

I heard about your refusal to evict some tenants whose landlords had defaulted on their mortgage payments and wanted to tell you about friends of ours here in the UK who could have been in just such difficulties. They are a family of; mum, dad and two boys aged 12 and 7. Their situation was even more precarious as they were “Asylum Seekers” who had fled the Ukraine. The Home Office had made their life hell for nearly 7 years, threatening to deport them even though mum has a broken back and is often bedbound as a result of racist assault in the Ukraine leading to mental breakdown. They live in a rented house which was owned by several landlords, one after the other and managed by a company which deals with the Home Office and Asylum Seekers. The landlord did abunk leaving the mortgage lender with no payments. An added complication was that the lender is Northern Rock which you may remember was the first UK bank to collapse last year before it all seriously blew up. This bank has now been “Nationalised” and is allegedly safe! Amazingly Northern Rock said “You know what, the rent is being paid so how about it just gets paid straight to us instead of leaving the house empty and rotting?” I read that the mortgage lenders have said they are not in the business of managing tenants, but tell me how they plan to recupe any money at all if they have empty houses all over the place which no-one can afford to buy and which lots of sitting tenants have already agreed to keep paying the rent? Very fortunately the Home Office have given permanent residence to my friends, which if they had done 7 years ago would have saved the country tens of thousands of pounds as they could have been working and mum’s mental state would not have deteriorated to the point she can not get out of bed sometimes. Let’s get the banks thinking sensibly shall we? Each tenant is a bird in the hand and otherwise it seems like they have got non in the bush! Keep up the good work!