I’ve never been in the situation so I don’t know, but do people facing eviction or repossession typically leave all of their personal stuff in the house (like the photos and diplomas on the wall, the clothes in the closet and so forth)? I’d think they’d remove the really personal stuff and perhaps leave the large, hard-to-remove items there. In other words, wouldn’t there be signs that the repo company is perhaps in the wrong house?
People facing eviction and/or repossession frequently have nowhere to go, so they often stay right up until they are forced to leave.
Even then, wouldn’t they be there the day of eviction, and try to get their personal stuff out, even if in garbage bags. I’m wondering if the situation would have looked odd to the repo guys. (“Boss, this doesn’t look like the house of someone on their last dime.”)
The repo company would have been under the impression that the eviction had already taken place, and people do just abandon stuff sometimes. That’s why these companies show up in trucks in the first place.
They got the wrong street (Godby Street v. Godby Heights) AND the wrong town (Logan v. Chapmanville). Unbelievable.
And here’s another one, from this time last year:
To modify The Music Man slightly:
O-ho the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-comin’ down the street.
Oh, please let him pass my door!
This is sick. There ought to be a law.
While i understand that this was something of a throw-away comment, for me it actually gets to the heart of the matter here.
I acknowledge that there is no criminal law to deal with what happened here. I understand that this type of incident is not subject to the sort of criminal negligence laws that apply in other areas. I accept that, right now, there is no way to pursue criminal charges against the bank or against the company that removed and destroyed the property.
But my contention is that there should be such a law.
If we, as a society, are going to allow entities like banks and their agents to break into secured property and not simply take and store, but actually destroy the contents of that property, then we should also have laws that hold them accountable for doing this properly. And not just civil laws. There should be a law that allows the pursuit of criminal negligence actions in cases like this.
Private property is (for better or worse) treated with considerable reverence in American culture and American law, and this incident touches closely on fundamental questions of the nature and inviolability of private property. I think the issues here are important enough that society has an interest in protecting its citizens from incidents like this not just through the remedies of civil law, but through the actions of criminal prosecution.
Fundamentally, i believe that this problem is important enough that negligence on the part of the bank and/or its agents should be treated as criminal negligence, and not just a tort.
Absent such legislation, at the very least i would like to see a set of minimum standards applied in terms of the civil remedies, to the extent that the wronged party is guaranteed to be made whole, not just in terms of their stuff, but in terms of the time and effort required to seek civil restitution, pay their attorney, and then go out and purchase their whole life’s worth of possessions over again.
Such standards should hold the bank and its agents separately and jointly liable. The law should also require that the first step is reimbursing the wronged party. In the event that there is a dispute between the bank and the agent over who is actually responsible for the fuck-up, they should be required to cough up 50% of the reimbursement each, and then sort out the differences between them later, in court if necessary.
I’m trying to imagine the nightmare if a bank did this to me. Even if the bank was reasonable enough (ha!) to agree with my calculation regarding the monetary value of all my stuff, i can hardly conceive of the amount of time and and the hassle it would require for my wife and me to re-purchase all our clothes, all our household goods, all our electronic equipment, all our CDs and DVDs, and all of the thousand or so books that we keep at home rather than in our campus offices.
Well, it’s not unheard of: we have other (but very few) cases in which we assign criminal liability based only on actions, and not on intent.
But I don’t think society as a whole is prepared to agree that we should add incidents like this to that small list.
Let’s say your neighbor has a barbecue, and his gas grill explodes, setting fire to your house. All your stuff is destroyed; not just your chattels but your actual home. Should your neighbour face criminal penalties? If not, why not? He’s left you even worse off than the wrong-house-repossessing bank.
You seem pretty sure about that.
It seems to me that, if they were asked about the issue, it is conceivable that Americans’ ideas about the sanctity of private property, combined with their current state of disillusionment with the banking and mortgage industry, might result in considerable (perhaps even overwhelming) support for criminal negligence laws in cases like the one being discussed here.
Well, as with so many similar issues, the devil is in the details of the particular case.
Why did the grill explode? Was it due to improper maintenance or some other negligence on the part of the neighbor? Was it due to a manufacturing defect? Something else?
But more importantly, for me, is the fact that it is very easy for the bank and its agents to get these things right in the first place. That’s the main reason why i wouldn’t mind seeing criminal sanctions. Basically, how hard is it to find the right house, and how negligent do you have to be NOT to find the right house, in a case where the consequences are that the contents of the wrong house will be removed and destroyed?
I understand that some addresses take a little bit of work to find. I’ve been invited to houses before where it was sometimes hard to find the neighborhood, or to determine where the right block was, or see what the house number was. You know what i did in each of those cases, before simply walking up and knocking on any old door? I looked back at the address i had written down; i looked again at the map; i looked again at the street signs and the house numbers, in order to make sure i had the right place.
If a doofus like me, without even the benefit of a GPS in my car, and with the knowledge that the consequences of getting it wrong consist only of some mild embarrassment when i knock on the wrong door, can manage to get it right EVERY SINGLE TIME, it beggars belief that a company whose whole business model is removing and destroying people’s property can’t manage to find the right place.
My basic argument here is that this is a situation where it is so easy to do it right, and where the consequences of doing it wrong are so final and dramatic, that getting it wrong could reasonably be defined as criminal negligence.
Another important difference between the current scenario and your gas grill comparison? In the gas grill incident, i might have lost everything, but chances are that, if my house is destroyed, then so is my neighbor’s house. That is, he has a very good incentive, even in the absence of criminal negligence laws, to not have his gas grill explode. None of this gets me my property back, and i’ll still sue him (or his insurance company?), but he has been punished by his own negligence in this case. That is not true of the bank and its agents in the incidents under discussion here.
Speaking of insurance, by the way: does anyone know if a household policy would cover an incident like the ones under discussion in this thread? After all, while the bank might not have broken any criminal laws in taking the stuff, the stuff has still been taken.
Criminal negligence for who exactly? It’s not like it’s the highly paid bank president who is filling out the paperwork and makes a mistake. Or who misreads the paperwork and actually goes to the wrong location. Do you really want to send some clerk or repo driver to prison? I might be plenty disillusioned with the people who run the banks, but there’s no way those people had actual hands-on involvement with these foreclosures.
Right now, it seems that the banks and the companies that they employ will simply say “Oops, my bad” when this sort of accident happens. They pay market value for the things that can be said to have a monetary value, and they might or might not apologize. I don’t think that’s enough of a deterrent. I think that whoever makes the mistake should have to make the victim whole again, or as whole as possible. It’s going to be impossible to replace something like Great Grandma’s crocheted bedspread with money, for instance. Oh, sure, you can buy another crocheted bedspread, and for a quite reasonable sum. But it’s not the same one.
Banks have a lot of power to disrupt people’s lives, and a lot of legal protections. I think that the average person should have some protection against the banks, as well.
This is the sort of thing (like Voter Fraud) where I’d like to see how many of these incidents occur before declaring that we have a problem that needs legal remedy.
With 4.5 million foreclosures since 2008, you could have hundreds of these mistakes with the banks knocking down a 99.99% accuracy rate. How much more work has to be done on all 4.5 million foreclosures to add another 9 to the rate? At some point, you have to admit that human beings make mistakes, and have the law reflect that.
I am on record in this thread as favoring a more structured process with documentation requirements, specific insurance for foreclosure actions and potential for treble damages in the case of error.
We’ll assume, for the sake of the question, that the explosion was solely due to the neighbor’s negligence. Let’s say he poured lighter fluid on the grill before igniting it because he heard that was a good idea. And sure, maybe his house is destroyed too, but maybe it’s untouched. What then?
Losing the stuff in your home is not a “dramatic” consequence. Being killed or injured is a dramatic consequence. That’s why driving under the influence and statutory rape are strict liability offenses (those which do not require intent) and accidentally emptying a house is not.
Yes, homeowners’ insurance would probably cover this sort of loss, subject to the insurer’s subrogation rights against the bank/repo company (they get their money back from whatever you recover from the at-fault parties).
That’s all you needed to say, really.
I guess you and i have a different definition of “dramatic,” and more discussion probably won’t close that gap.
And, personally, i would describe being killed or injured as a bit more than “dramatic.”
Yes, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong. People may be disillusioned about banks, but no one wants to hang a $9.50 per hour worker out to dry for making a mistake.
I guess that settles it, then. You’re the lawyer; this is about the law; you must be right.
It’s not about defining “dramatic”. It’s about whatever standard you want to apply to determine when a particular negligent act should be criminal rather than civil, and as a rule we just don’t do that for property “crimes”.
How about the company itself?
Corporations can, if i understand my reading correctly, be the subject of criminal prosecution and conviction. I’m not looking to put some minimum-wage schlub in prison for making a mistake. I’m not even looking to haul the CEO or middle management off to the pokey. I’m looking to penalize the entity or entities that—through some combination of poor oversight, poor training, lax standards, etc., etc.—take and destroy property belonging to someone who has done nothing wrong, and who, in fact, has no relationship at all to the case.
Maybe an alternative way to go about this might be an administrative rather than a criminal penalty. Not sure if “administrative” is the right word here, but i’ll explain. Entities like the SEC, the FCC, the FDA, and a bunch of others, have the ability to impose penalties such as fines on individuals and on corporations, for various types of misdeeds. Why not have a similar system for cases like this?
This system would, ideally, have whatever agency is charged with this (i guess, for the banks, it might be the Fed) pursue the offending bank on behalf of the injured party, and on behalf of the people more generally. Penalties could include restitution and some punitive damages, to be paid to the injured party, plus a fine that would go to the government (or somewhere else?). That would help people who need help, without turning the whole thing into a possible lottery jackpot whereby victims get massive and disproportionate damages. It would also penalize the bank over and above the dollar amount of its fuck-up.
Now, you might argue, fines and penalties like these are generally levied as civil actions through the courts, so aren’t we just back to square one, where the whole thing can be settled by a civil action? Yes and no. These penalties might be imposed as civil actions, but they’re actions undertaken by the government entities, and the fines themselves, if they’re large enough, can theoretically act as a deterrent to future shitty behavior. Also, a system like this would allow for increasingly large fines for repeated offenses, meaning that the bank doesn’t just get away with forking over $18,000 (or whatever trivial amount) each time it screws one of these things up. If you fine them $20,000 for the first offense, $200,000 for the second, $2,000,000 for third, etc., you might get their attention enough that they will actually institute procedures that prevent these sorts of things from happening.
I’m not sure if the law would currently allow for such a setup, but i’m talking here about my notion of a just outcome, not simply about the law as it currently exists.
What i’d like to see here is a system that allows for adequate remedy, without the injured party having to do all the legwork in order to be made whole. I’d also like a system where there are penalties, on top of restitution, that are large enough to actually encourage reform in the companies’ practices.