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Thousands Of D.C. Renters Are Evicted Every Year. Do They All Know To Show Up To Court? | DCist

Process servers are supposed to deliver summonses that tell tenants about their eviction cases. But the only evidence that they actually notify tenants of their cases are sworn documents filed by the process servers themselves, and a DCist investigation uncovered hundreds of documents in the span of...

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Hasnain says:

This is so depressing and a great example of why change must be made to the systems and it’s not about any one person. However in this case there’s at least one person that needs to go to jail.

TLDR: to defend themselves from an eviction a tenant needs to show up in court. To know they have to show up to court they have to be served by a process server in person - who has to try twice and only upon failure can they give a sworn affidavit that they tried, and then leave a notice at the door. Enter some people that took money and never bothered serving notices, leading hundreds of people to get unfairly evicted.

“Oddly, however, the two men almost never managed to find the tenants they were hired to serve. Despite the requirement that he make a diligent effort to serve tenants in person—visiting their apartments twice, on different days, if no one answers the first time—Buck reported, in roughly 990 eviction cases, that not a single person answered the door. According to affidavits that Stephens filed, out of roughly 1,660 cases in the first two months of 2019, he only managed to serve 11 people in person.

And in one instance, Stephens swore that he contacted more than 15 D.C. tenants in a two-hour period, when he was actually in a courtroom in Maryland, facing a charge of driving while impaired.”

Posted on 2020-10-06T05:34:17+0000