Cross Roads Podcast Presents - Vince Handler Future Justice Of The Peace for Precinct 5

Now, before when you were running in the primaries, one of the key things that you were really emphasizing on was cleaning up the processor service process because the courts had gotten backed up so bad and there were a myriad of problems involved because those process servers were not doing their

jobs right.

That's correct.

and just to give a little bit of background, what the role of adjust the piece, uh, there's a lot of people that don't really know what adjust the piece does when I'm campaigning and they're asking me questions like, don't you do marriages? I'm like, well, every judge can technically do a marriage on behalf of them just being a judge.

Um, but the, just the piece throughout Texas is a very high volume court, uh, statistically texas citizens have a higher chance of interacting with a judge from a justice peace court than they do with any other court very very high volume uh justice peace courts have jurisdiction over all evictions uh truancy for the kids who who are missing enough school they handle class c misdemeanors everything from uh traffic tickets to animal cruelty and just a wide variety of criminal cases that don't involve jail time.

And then small claims that are valued at $20,000 or less.

Now that is a very big volume just in itself.

That's where a lot of my practice time in the JP courts have happened.

And I'm usually on the plaintiff's side, but not always.

So my clients that I'm representing is going to be For example, Bank of America, if you don't pay your credit card bill, eventually they might decide to sue you if the balance is under $20,000.

And there's a lot of people that are behind on their credit card bills.

And some of them go to collections and eventually they'll show up in court.

in a lawsuit so a lawsuit starts with the petitioner the bank of america for example chase bank whoever or the person who as a landlord is trying to evict somebody out of their their apartment for a non-payment of rent either way you have a plaintiff that files a lawsuit well the constitution requires that you as a defendant become aware of the lawsuit so you can properly defend yourself And the way that works is normally a process server would take a copy of the filed lawsuit and come knock on your door and hand you the lawsuit.

Now you're aware that there's a lawsuit pending and you know the date that you're going to have to go and respond and you take it from there.

So the process servers, once they serve the defendant with the paperwork, they're required to write an affidavit stating that they served you.

And they sign it under a penalty of perjury.

And a lot of times they'll have a description of what you look like.

And, you know, they said, hey, is your name Steven, you know, whatever.

And you say yes.

And so they write that down.

Hey, he answered when I called him.

And this is what he looked like.

And this is the time of day and where I was at.

And they filed that affidavit with the court.

So the court and the plaintiff know that the defendant is aware of the lawsuit.