After a summer spent in Oklahoma eviction courts, Adam Hines still thinks of the renters he saw as they turned away from the judge – tenants who were tasked with representing themselves in court but were only given the chance to answer two questions before their eviction was approved.

“They were teary eyed, but they weren’t just sad,” said Hines, a third-year law student at the University of Oklahoma. “They were obviously angry, upset, disappointed and felt hopeless, and seeing that in their faces proved to me the damage that these proceedings do to people’s faith in the justice system. If people aren’t receiving due process, if they don’t feel like they’re being heard, then they stop believing in these institutions.”

For an Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation project, Hines observed about 500 eviction cases in nine counties, including Cleveland, Oklahoma and Tulsa counties.

The results are the subject of a report the organization published on Monday, which underscores how differently landlords and renters experience eviction proceedings, with corporate landlords receiving favorable outcomes even when they didn’t have the right to sue.

“A lot of what was observed this summer, I think, doesn’t feel like justice,” said Katie Dilks, executive director of the Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation.

In the report, Hines compared an eviction docket to waiting for your number to come up at a crowded Department of Motor Vehicles office.

“You really start to feel like you’re not in a courtroom anymore,” he said. “You feel more like you’re in a collection agency, just one that has the power of the state behind it.”

Unable to sue, but filing evictions anyway

Out of the evictions the project followed that involved corporate landlords, 20% were filed by businesses that couldn’t legally sue because they weren’t properly registered with the Secretary of State.

“It really speaks to this challenge that we have when our eviction court system is built so that there are literally no checks and balances built in unless a tenant has an attorney to raise them,” Dilks said.

Eric Hallett, statewide coordinator of housing advocacy for Legal Aid Services of Oklahoma, said it’s common for this scenario to put renters in a bind if the company uses a separate name to seek unpaid rent and fees. Housing or credit providers looking at the tenant’s rental or credit history may find records that suggest they owe multiple debts to multiple companies when it’s all the same debt.

Hallett said when he first started working on evictions in Tulsa County about five years ago that the docket was filled with cases filed by companies that didn’t have the right to sue. Now the legal aid nonprofit assigns staff to screen the companies filing evictions so they can point out the issue in court when it comes up.

“It really highlights how the eviction industry cuts every corner to evict people with as little work as possible,” Hallett said. “It’s the lawyer’s job to look up the ownership and make sure everything is done correctly, but when you have 100 or 200 cases that you’re taking to court at a time, it’s just very time-consuming to make all those checks, and so they don’t bother to do it.”

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Renter advocates say most tenants don’t know this issue could help get their eviction dismissed if they don’t have an attorney. And that’s a problem because in civil courts across the country, including Oklahoma’s eviction courts, most defendants can’t afford an attorney. Landlords, on the other hand, usually have a lawyer to represent them, creating a power imbalance.

In the cases followed by the Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation, 4% of renters had an attorney, compared to 51% of landlords.

How courts could level the playing field

Eviction proceedings observed during the study varied widely from courtroom to courtroom, with some judges holding full trials and others keeping it brief. In one court, a judge asked renters if they had a lease and if they were behind on their rent. If the tenant answered yes to both questions, the eviction was granted without asking the landlord anything.

“It is incumbent on the judge and the court system to make sure that the people who are using that system know why and how it is working,” Dilks said, “And I think that two-question, really quick approach is not living out that concept of procedural fairness.”

In Oklahoma, people who are evicted have at least 48 hours to move out of their home, and judges have the option to order landlords to give renters more time.

In some courts, the report found, judges have interpreted the 48-hour rule to mean that the law prevents them from giving renters more time to move out, even though there’s no such rule in Oklahoma’s laws for small claims court procedures or the state’s landlord-tenant act.

“It really depends on what judge you end up in front of, and that has obviously life-changing consequences for someone,” said Becky Gligo, executive director of Housing Solutions in Tulsa.

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Dilks said the different legal interpretations by judges highlighted the need for more education and support.

“They don’t really have a lot of ongoing back-up or support, especially in these high-volume dockets, and so these judges end up being really siloed,” she said. “They don’t share information across counties, so I think they just don’t know how other folks are doing it.”

To help shrink overcrowded dockets and give judges the time to ensure each case receives due process, the Access to Justice report recommends courts require eviction filings to include proof that the landlord owns the property, is properly registered as a business and to provide an affidavit saying the property is habitable.

Similar rules in other places, including Philadelphia, Penn., have led to fewer eviction filings.

“It’s one of those solutions that doesn’t cost any money,” Hines said. “It’s already a legal requirement to have the capacity to sue and it wouldn’t be that hard to check.”

Contact BigIfTrue.org editor Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Twitter.

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