When I read about the latest manifestation of California’s voluntary descent toward Third World status – in this case, the defunding of San Francisco’s civil court system thanks to the deep state budget cuts caused by Republicans – in this morning’s SF Chronicle, I tried to fight through my despair and search for a silver lining.
“With a few exceptions, only criminal cases will go to trial,” the article said, listing those exceptions as mostly family law cases, such as child abuse and neglect and domestic violence.
Hmmm, I thought, is there a way for the average San Franciscan to somehow benefit from this virtual shutdown of our justice system? Then, we at the Guardian had an idea: in a city where two-thirds of residents are renters, perhaps a civil court system that will now take years to get a hearing would be a boon to those contesting eviction proceedings.
Yay, we thought, free rent! And given that it’s mostly the property-owning class that has caused this decimation of basic government services, people who have benefited mightily by having Prop. 13 keep their property taxes artificially low but still block other efforts to increase tax revenues, there seemed to be a certain poetic justice in the possibility that the courts would stop helping them evict their tenants.
So I called San Francisco Tenants Union Director Ted Gullicksen to run our idea past him and find out if we were onto something, but he doused the idea with a bucket of ice-cold reality. It turns out that evictions will continue to move rapidly through the otherwise gutted civil court system (as I would have learned from the Bay Citizen article on the issue).
“Unfortunately, tenants and criminals are being fast tracked,” he told us. And it gets even worse than that because while landlords will still be able to demand action on their evictions within five days, tenants will find years-long delays when they seek justice from landlords acting illegally or unfairly. “While they will move quickly on evictions, they will move slowly on wrongful eviction lawsuits,” Gullicksen said.
Ann Donlan, spokesperson for the San Francisco Superior Court, told us that eviction proceedings will still move quickly because “it’s a statutory requirement.” But, I asked her, as a matter of fairness and equity, why the courts will still delay wrongful eviction suits for years, even though they often deal with the same set of facts as the eviction cases? Doesn’t that bias the courts toward landlords? She told me to please submit my question in writing and she’ll try to get me an answer.
But there really aren’t any good answers to the gross inequities that these deep cuts will cause in the court system, with a 40 percent overall cut being disproportionately focused on the civil side of the equation.
“This is pretty heavy duty,” attorney Stephen Sommers, who handles wrongful termination, civil rights, and other cases on behalf of the little guy. He said many businesses in San Francisco already wantonly disregard their employees’ rights. “They feel like they can get away with murder and now they’ll be highly incentivized to continue that.”
Attorneys facing five-year waits for a trial will be less likely to handle cases on contingent for poor plaintiffs, he said, and people in positions of power of all kind will be more likely to abuse their authority in myriad ways, knowing that their victims will have far less recourse in the courts.
“It’s going to be the wild west out there,” he said. “I wonder, if people can’t turn to the courts, whether they’ll take matters into their own hands and the crime rate will go up.”
But if there is any silver lining for the powerless at all, Gullicksen said the powerful will also find less recourse in an overwhelmed court system. So he suggested, “It might be a good time for a citywide rent strike because they don’t have many resources in the court system anymore.”