Unless you are an owner or someone facing eviction, you may not have paid much attention to the order of SC Chief Justice Don Beatty, making it more difficult to evict tenants.
It is worth attention.
Unlike the court president’s March order that imposed a temporary moratorium on COVID-19 on all evictions, which was made in conjunction with the drastic reduction in all court activities, the latter order did not change any part of the law. Quite the opposite. And that is what makes it worthy of attention.
As Thad Moore of the Post and Courier reports, the directive protects tenants from having to pay all overdue rent to appeal an eviction order – a requirement that prevented most tenants from filing an appeal, even if they had a solid legal basis. .
Judge Beatty sent the memo to the judges not because he decided to give the tenants a break, but because the law does not require them to pay past due rent to appeal. Instead, Section 27-40-800 (b) of the SC Code clearly states that eviction is delayed during an appeal, provided that tenants pay their rent on time during the appeal and judges are routinely adding additional burdensome requirements without authority to do so.
While there is a big difference between evictions and police raids, this actually resembles a July order that temporarily suspended preventive arrest warrants.
Judge Beatty issued this earlier moratorium after conducting a search with magistrates and finding that “unsuccessful search warrants are routinely issued upon request, without further investigation” because “most do not understand the severity of detective search warrants and do not discern the heightened requirements for issuing a no-knock warrant.
The court’s president said the moratorium would remain in effect until he could write some clear standards – South Carolina has none now, whether through state law or court orders – for when judges should issue warrants that essentially protect the liability police when they break into houses without warning and business.
However big the difference this last directive will make in the lives of people in dire situations, what is legally and politically significant is that it marked the second time in three months that the president of the court had to intervene to correct clear misapplications of the law, not in an individual case, but systemically.
It is not uncommon for the court to reverse orders from lower courts; that’s why we have appellate courts. What is unusual is that the president of the court sees errors so widespread that he has to act outside an individual appeal to correct the lower courts.
It is no accident that, in both cases, the judges who were misapplying the law were our most political and least educated judges: magistrates.
Magistrates are technically appointed by the governor, but are actually handpicked by the state senator who represents the area in which they work. They do not need to be lawyers or have any relevant experience and, as Joseph Cranney of The Post and Courier reported last year, SC magistrates often ignore defendants’ basic constitutional rights and have less training needed than state barbers or masseuses. .
Consecutive orders from the President of the Court of Justice calling on them to take routine action on life-changing issues that do not comply with the law underscore the need for reforms to our magistrate requirements or our magistrate appointment system, or both. And sooner or later.
