LA tenant firm demands jury trials, shaking up court system

LOS ANGELES — Depending on who is being asked, eviction defense nonprofit Basta is either a savior or an annoying racket that is clogging up civil and even criminal courtrooms.

To those facing unfair evictions by overzealous landlords during a period of skyrocketing rents in the Los Angeles area, Basta, which in Spanish means “enough,” couldn’t have arrived at a better time.

From the point of view of landlords struggling to collect rent, and their attorneys, Basta’s tactic of demanding $5,000 payments in order to avoid trial is unfair, though none of the firms’ lawyers is known to have been sanctioned by a judge or the State Bar.

Two Los Angeles County Superior Court judges told the Daily Journal on condition of anonymity that the expanding number of unlawful detainer trial requests are taking up an inordinate amount of court time, not only of civil judges but of criminal judges who are being called in to handle the cases. They said the requests for trial and delaying tactics take up court time even when in most cases the trials never take place.

Meanwhile, Basta said it has saved 25,000 men, women, and children from homelessness, argued for eight published cases that have changed the state of the law, and revolutionized how evictions are handled through the use of the jury trial. Aside from the city of Los Angeles, Basta claims to represent more tenants than every other nonprofit organization combined, according to founder Daniel Bramzon.

Bramzon said he started resorting to jury trials in every unlawful detainer case when he realized jury pools were more sympathetic to their clients than judges, who often come from a more affluent background. It’s all about class, he said.

When it came to the issue of credibility, Bramzon said judges mostly sided with the landlord’s word over the tenants. A jury was a broader, more sympathetic set of eyes, he said. “Right then and there, the whole world changed,” he said.

“Landlords and the system could no longer railroad a tenant out of their home. Instead, they had to go through the due process of a jury trial. The courts weren’t ready for it,” Bramzon said.

Once he began taking his cases to trial in 2005, Bramzon said he went from winning 60 percent of bench trials to winning 85 to 90 percent of jury trials.

But whatever the feeling is toward the pro-tenant firm, which runs out of an unglamorous office building near MacArthur Park, Basta has been keeping courts busy, especially Department 94 in the Stanley Mosk Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.

Over the last year and a half, unlawful detainer cases comprised 44 percent of trial cases across Los Angeles County, or about 1,600 of 3,700 cases, according to superior court records.

In 2016, there were 1,246 unlawful detainer trials across the county, compared to 600 such trials per year before the 2013 court consolidation, a 50 percent hike, according to Mary Hearn, public information officer for the court.

“That number has increased dramatically. As this happened, and the trial courtrooms have taken on more unlawful detainer trials, a small number of criminal judges volunteered to handle personal injury and unlawful detainer trials,” Hearn said in an email.

By way of comparison, San Bernardino County courts have had a decrease in unlawful detainer trials over the past five years, with no jury trial since 2015.

The Los Angeles County statistics may contain some redundancy because cases get sent back and forth to the trial court more than once, as trials that went through calendaring Department 1 are the only ones counted, Hearn said. The court was unable to provide data distinguishing bench trials from jury trials.

Underlying this issue is soaring city rents, where median one-bedroom rentals are the sixth highest in the country, according to a June report by apartment rental platform Zumper.

Basta has become a household and controversial name simply by demanding a jury trial in every case. What starts off as a landlord bringing a tenant to court over a bounced check results in the tables turning against the landlord. Basta will demand a jury trial but also make an offer to avoid one. A typical offer by Basta includes: pay Basta $5,000, waive all back rent and give the tenant 30 to 60 days to move out.

“They are not Robin Hood. They’re clever people who have figured out how to game the system to help themselves a lot more than tenants,” said Santa Monica attorney Craig Mordoh, who has squared off against Basta many times while representing landlords.

Landlord attorneys say Basta’s delaying tactics make the road to trial very much a headache, and it can take multiple appearances to get sent out of Department 94 to Department 1 for trial assignment. During this time, the tenant lives rent-free.

“It has clogged the system so badly,” said William Robison of Mandelbaum and Robison LLP, who has been representing landlords for more than 35 years. He says most of his clients pay Basta’s demand while Mordoh said it depends on what his clients want to do.

“I don’t think their game plan is to win. Their game plan is to coerce financial dollar settlements out of the landlord because it is more conducive to do that than a jury trial, which is unreasonably expensive for a landlord, but not the tenant — and get a good settlement and keep it for themselves,” said Mordoh.

Claudia Medina, an attorney with Eviction Defense Network, said she became frustrated as a young attorney representing tenants who faced displacement by landlords looking to make more money by bringing in higher paying tenants.

“Those judges at the time never believed our clients. As a young attorney, I was getting depressed. I felt the system was rigged against low-income tenants,” said Medina, who was inspired by what she saw Basta doing.

“Landlords are trying to come up with tactics to cause tenants to breach their lease, making it harder for them to pay their rent,” said Medina, who for a while worked at Basta. She justified the settlement demands as reasonable to cover relocation expenses in a very competitive, expensive housing market.

In one case, a landlord tried evicting a tenant for violating her lease because she had a cat, which she had for the previous 15 years without a problem, said Bramzon. There was a new owner and the rental market value of the apartment had tripled, he said.

Eviction defense attorneys said courts and landlord attorneys are displeased with Basta merely exercising their clients’ constitutional right to have a jury trial. The model has been replicated by Public Counsel, Eviction Defense Network, and other tenant defense organizations, Bramzon said.

He recalled one time when a supervising district attorney warned him that he was was ticking off judges and didn’t know what he was doing. “My response was, ‘I don’t care who I upset. I demand the constitutional right to a jury trial. I am representing my clients,’” Bramzon said.

“It’s a business model he’s developed and he’s quite successful at it,” argued defense attorney Robison. “He’s hired these attorneys to extort landlords because it doesn’t pay economically to do jury trials. It’s not about justice at all. In Department 94, the judges are getting very irked when cases are constantly being continued because trial attorneys are in trial and can’t get out.”

Medina said, however, “I don’t see why there is this criticism of jury trials when all we’re asking for is a jury of our clients’ peers to see if they are entitled to live in their home.”

Attorneys interviewed for this story said some of the problem rests on the inconveniences of the court system. For example, before being sent out to a trial court, jury instructions must be agreed upon by both sides rather than a judge selecting them.

Basta handles 15 to 20 jury trials a year, winning 70 percent of them, Bramzon said. “Basta attorneys are well-trained in litigation procedure and use every statute at their disposal to aggressively defend our tenants. We give poor, indigent tenants the service big firms provide to their own clients. It’s not my fault the landlords are not ready for it,” he said.