So much was at stake, but there was nowhere to sit. The courtroom’s wooden pews couldn’t hold them all. So the people called into Country Meadows Justice Court sat in the jury box and pressed themselves against the white walls. A group waited in the hallway outside. They clutched bright green eviction papers and practiced what they would tell the judge.

They were going to lose. They just didn’t know it yet.

Behind the bench, Judge Louis Goodman scanned his daily docket. It listed 128 eviction hearings. Then he flicked on a digital clock and motioned to the lawyers' table, where attorney Kevin Holliday sat behind a tall stack of folders.

"Are you ready to go, sir?" Goodman asked.

"I can certainly start," Holliday said. He stood and carried his folders to the bench. Loose papers shifted inside. Holliday had loaded them in advance, filling in the details of judgments he would almost surely win: Hundreds of dollars owed, five days to move out.

Goodman took the first file and read the name aloud. He looked up. Holliday twisted around. A crammed courtroom stared back, but nobody moved. Six seconds passed. Silence. Goodman called the name again. He waited 3 more seconds.

“Defendant is not present. Judgment will be entered," he said, reaching for Holliday’s pre-filled form. He scanned it. Signed it. Handed to the clerk.

The day’s first tenant had been evicted. The hearing lasted 10 seconds.

Goodman called a couple's names. They weren't there. Their case took 13 seconds. The next lasted 7 seconds. Six. Six again. Eight seconds. Each one would empty another home.

“All right, we’ve got more,” Goodman said 20 minutes later, after he had blitzed through 29 cases. All but one ended in eviction. “Wow. Busy day.”

The eviction cycle had reached its peak. It was the third Wednesday in June, one of the busiest times of the year in a Justice Court system that often works more like an eviction mill.

Last year, Maricopa County’s Justice Courts issued 42,460 eviction judgments, one for every 14 rental households in this massive county that's sinking ever-deeper into an affordable-housing crisis.

Once a person is sucked into the system, there’s almost no way to escape. A lawyer can help, but only a minuscule minority of tenants have one. The rest are overpowered by expert attorneys and overwhelmed in courtrooms where more time is spent on a single traffic ticket than a dozen life-altering evictions.

“There is nothing that goes on in the eviction system that is of any help to tenants,” said Ellen Sue Katz, executive director of the William E. Morris Institute for Justice, which advocates on behalf of low-income Arizonans.

Most cases are decided instantly, because the tenants don't show up to defend themselves. Those who do are led by lawyers into courtroom hallways, where they’re nudged toward signing a settlement and agreeing to move out.

The few people who actually stand before a Justice of the Peace get just a few seconds to unwind why they missed rent. They make often-futile efforts to shake off an eviction, to push their case to trial, to buy a couple more days at home.

“I was switching jobs, so I was just pulling money out of my 401(k),” a young man with gelled hair told Goodman. He was evicted.

“This is my first time ever being here,” a woman in yoga pants explained. She was evicted.

“There’s no way you can do a suspension for a few hours?” another woman asked.

There wasn’t. She was evicted.

One after another the evicted collected their papers. They dropped their heads and turned to trudge through the narrow center aisle, past the wooden pew where 60-year-old James French had spent the last two hours.

He stepped into the courtroom with confidence, certain he could keep his apartment and be home by breakfast. He didn’t think he needed a lawyer. Couldn’t afford one, anyway. He brushed off the landlord attorney who asked him to negotiate a settlement. He wouldn't settle. He was going to win.

Then he saw the courtroom, the short wall that split it in two. On one side sat white lawyers and a white judge. On the other waited the tenants. They were mostly Latino and black, like French. Almost all were poor, like him.

“It’s a racket,” he decided, and then all he could do was watch as defeated tenants shuffled past.

Finally the judge called his name. French’s artificial knee crackled as he walked to the front of the courtroom. He dropped his backpack and leaned both hands on the cold bench. He was alone.

He took a breath and stumbled through the story he had spent all night practicing: a terminally ill roommate. Two lost jobs. A charity that promised to cover a month’s rent, then couldn’t come up with the money. Another month of rent he couldn't pay. The bankruptcy case he filed in desperation, believing it would stop his eviction. And a wad of cash in his pocket. Just in case.

“All I need is time,” he said.

Goodman shook his head. He couldn’t give time. That’s not how it works. “Maybe or maybe not there was something nefarious,” he said, but the reason for unpaid rent rarely mattered. He signed the eviction and a judgment of $2,593.42.

“Anything they say goes?” French asked. The realization was setting in.

“The way the law breaks on this case,” Goodman replied, “I have to enforce the lease.”

French stepped back. He looked across the courtroom, which was now almost entirely empty. He dropped his head.

“So I should’ve been like all those folks," he said, "and not showed up.”

A fast, easy way to evict tenants

Inside Maricopa County's 26 Justice Courts, evictions cycle like the tides.

Every month, it begins again. The first passes. People miss rent. Something came up. A lost job, an unexpected illness, a child-custody case that sucked up every last dollar and hour. The reason rarely matters.

Most leases have built-in grace periods, allowing tenants an extra few days to pay up. Then grace ends, and out comes a flurry of five-day notices, demanding people pay or leave. Five days pass, and then come the phone calls to attorneys and the cut-and-paste eviction filings that spread across the county, pulling frictionless tenants into a Justice Court that can be located miles from their home.

The whole process can take just two weeks.

“Arizona has made a decision,” said Encanto Judge C. Steven McMurry, who spent five years as presiding judge of the Justice Court system and once taught judges how to manage 200 eviction cases in two hours. “We have to give landlords a fast, easy way to evict tenants.”

That decision has revealed itself in courtrooms that often schedule more than a case a minute, where most tenants don’t show up and those that do almost always lose. To see how that happens, The Arizona Republic analyzed a database of more than 335,000 eviction cases filed since 2013. The Republic also interviewed dozens of tenants, lawyers, judges and advocates and watched thousands of eviction cases move through the system’s busiest courtrooms.

Maricopa County’s landlords filed 62,800 eviction lawsuits last year. More than two-thirds of those resulted in eviction judgments, ordering tenants to pay a snowball of debt and move out in five days.

Not everybody does. More than 17,500 cases ended in writs of restitution, which send a constable to forcibly remove leftover tenants from the home.

Maricopa County, which includes almost the entire Phoenix area, sees seven times as many evictions per rental household as in New York City’s notoriously expensive market. A lack of national data makes a true comparison all but impossible, but those who study the issue say Arizona’s landlord-friendly laws result in more evictions here than much of the country.

"I think the problems are structural," Country Meadows Judge Anna Huberman said.

Some landlords claim the process isn’t fair — to them. Even the fastest judgments still leave them with a chunk of lost income and an unexpected need to clean, list and re-lease their units. The state’s largest landlord lobbying group, the Arizona Multihousing Association, has said that the quick eviction system keeps rents lower in the Phoenix area than in metro areas where the process moves more slowly.

THE NEW HOUSING CRISIS | PART 1: Can't afford the rent, can't afford to move | PART 2: 60 days to find a home | PART 3: 'Here for the eviction' | PART 4: $200 from home | PART 5: 'It just has to go' | PART 6: Into the trees | PART 7: Rapid evictions, few options

“Landlords have no interest in doing evictions,” said Mark Zinman, a landlord attorney and AMA board member. “The idea of running a multifamily property, or any other residential property, is to keep a person in that property, paying the rent.”

The overwhelming majority of defendants in eviction cases are, in fact, behind on their rent. Arizona law offers no defenses for them. But advocates and attorneys say they are certain that the system sweeps through an unknowable number of people who have worthy defenses, but never get a chance to raise them.

So they’re evicted in bunches, pulled out of their homes and into an affordable-housing shortage that’s chewed through Arizona’s supply of cheap rent, where the black stain of an eviction hovers in credit reports and on apartment applications, making it even more difficult to find a home.

“If I get evicted, I would be homeless,” a young man pleaded in Manistee Justice Court, the system’s busiest. His landlord said his friends had marijuana in the apartment. The young man told the judge that he was dyslexic, that he couldn’t work, couldn’t even read the lease. He was evicted anyway. Tears ran down his face as he dashed out of the courtroom, screaming past the metal detectors and out into the bright summer sun, where he dropped against the courthouse wall.

When evictions ended an hour later, the young man was still there. He had nowhere else to go.

Always one step behind

The surgical scar was still sore as Carrie Walthall walked into the courthouse. She carried a Polar Pop in her hands and an eviction filing in her purse. Bored-looking security guards waved her through the metal detector, past the cloudy windows where the evicted waited in line to pay their debts and into the hallway where they tried to negotiate them away.

She swung open the heavy door and looked inside. The wooden pews of Manistee Justice Court were almost full. The only spot left was in the corner.

Walthall, 30, slid down the back row and leaned against the wall. She unfolded her eviction paperwork and looked it over again, replaying the spiral she still couldn’t believe. How had she ended up here? How had it all collapsed so quickly?

It had been just 39 days since she worked her last shift at the retirement home, then checked herself into the hospital for a surgery that had kept her out of work ever since. Eighteen days since she couldn’t come up with her $920 rent. Fifteen days since she found a notice on her door, giving her one last chance to pay it. Seven days since thecourt papers arrived, announcing the date she dreaded.

She just needed a few more days to catch up. Two weeks, tops. Then a new paycheck would arrive, and she could pay it all off. But the eviction cycle was in full swing, and Arizona’s fast-track process kept her always one step behind.

Most landlords build grace periods into their leases, allowing tenants an extra few days to pay. But once that deadline passes, the eviction cycle kicks into gear. Judges and court clerks know the rhythms: Every month, eviction filings peak between the 15th and the 20th. Judgments spike six days later.

“It’s very, very fast,” said David Arenberg, executive director of the fledgling Arizona Tenants Union, which is attempting to build a culture of tenants’ rights in the state. “The law definitely allows landlords this expedited way of evicting tenants.”

Arizona’s system isn’t the fastest in the country — Georgia does not mandate a waiting period between when a landlord issues a missed-rent notice and when they can file for eviction — but it blows past most other major metropolitan areas, which typically have higher rents and stronger tenant protections. California’s process usually takes at least a month. Tenant advocates in New York City tell clients that their case could last anywhere from one to six months.

In Walthall’s native Pennsylvania, her eviction case might have taken as long as six weeks. But because she had moved to Arizona, she found herself in the courtroom in half that time: Less than three weeks after she missed rent.

The landlord told her they could work something out. But late fees and court costs had ballooned her debt. Somehow, $920 in missed rent had grown into more than $1,300, and she still had no income to pay it off.

Only a third of judgments issued between 2013 and 2017 specified how much rent the tenant owed. In those cases, a third of what tenants were ordered to pay, on average, came from costs and fees added to the missed rent.

“It’s impossible,” Walthall said, but her health was improving. She could return to work by the end of the month, back to cleaning the Sun City retirement home where everybody seemed so wise. She had started selling her belongings, collecting as much cash as she could. Soon she could pay it all off, and she’d be back on track, free to focus on the high-school diploma she was about to finish and the nursing-school dreams she had put on hold.

But it wouldn’t come soon enough. The eviction cycle had revved to life, pulling Walthall into a slide she couldn’t stop. All she could do was sit in the courtroom, chewing ice from her Polar Pop as she waited for her name to be called.

Around her, the courtroom emptied. One woman tried to appear for her son, because he was at work, saving money for another apartment. She couldn’t stop it. He was evicted. Another woman, shaking with nerves, promised she would pay whatever it took to stay in her apartment. Evicted. A young man told the judge that an eviction might cost him custody of his daughter. Evicted.

Midway through, a young man with a frizzy poof of hair flung himself through the heavy door. Sweat dripped from his forehead, darkening his blood-red tank top. He dropped onto a bench and tried to catch his breath.

He didn’t own a car, he explained, and public transportation doesn’t reach anywhere near the court. So he rode the bus as far as he could and walked the last three miles.

He was evicted in four minutes.

An hour passed before the judge called Walthall’s name. She approached the bench, now certain nobody was going to listen. The judge read off her new debt: $1,314.78.

“Do you agree that you owe that amount of money?” Judge Cheryl A. Brown, a substitute, asked her.

“Yes,” Walthall muttered. She heard the scratch of the judge’s pen.

The only lawyers in the room

Andrew Hull closed his crime novel, collected a short stack of files and shuffled to the bench. It was 8:51 a.m. in San Tan Justice Court, and he had a light day of evictions ahead.

“Morning, your honor,” he told the judge. She greeted him by name and called the first case. Nobody stood up. She signed the form and called out another. Hull said that the tenant had signed a settlement agreement. The judge called the next case. Both judge and lawyer scanned the courtroom, looking for some sign of movement, but found nothing.

“Judgment for plaintiff,” the judge said.

“Thank you, your honor,” Hull replied.

It was 8:52 a.m. He had two courtrooms to go.

As the eviction epidemic has spread, Hull and a small group of eviction lawyers have effectively seized control of the system. Justice Court data shows just four men — Hull, Scott Clark, Scott Williams and Matthew Koglmeier — appeared in more than 46,600 eviction filings last year, making up 77 percent of legal representatives for landlords.

But the lawyer listed in the case file isn’t always the one who shows up. Larger firms tend to file most of their cases under one main name. And rival firms have standing deals to pick up each other’s cases, working together to spread across the county’s courtrooms. “Are you covering for anybody else today?” judges usually ask, prompting lawyers to pull out a stack of files they’ve never seen before.

Sometimes they're the only lawyers in the room. Just 0.3 percent of defendants brought their own attorneys to eviction cases last year, facing the 88 percent of landlords who had them. Justices of the Peace, who are elected, aren’t required to hold law degrees. Many don't.

If a lawyer is busy next door, a judge will wait to call their cases, while tenants who arrive late get evicted. Some uncertain judges will look to more experienced attorneys for guidance. Paperwork is rarely given more than a quick glance, partly because of time constraints but mostly because it’s assumed lawyers will get it right.

"There is a higher level of trust with the attorneys," Encanto Judge McMurry said.

Even when they get it wrong, judges will sometimes allow lawyers to tweak their cases while they’re in motion. One lawyer realized midway through a hearing in Encanto Justice Court that he had made a mistake: a clerical error, he called it. He asked to tack $1,437.32 onto the judgment.

The judge — a substitute, filling in for McMurry — asked no questions, and doubled the tenant’s debt.

Eviction lawyers work on trust and volume. Hull, a soft-spoken 70-year-old, has earned both. He knows every judge and their tendencies. He’s spent more time in courtrooms than most of them, knows more of the dense Arizona Residential Landlord and Tenant Act than they do. His conversations are littered with citations from the 47-page law, which governs all residential rentals in the state. Sometimes he tacks on the specific statute number.

Hull’s legendary memory of the law is aided by the fact that he helped write it. During a major revision to the Landlord-Tenant Act, in the mid-1990s, Hull drafted sections that streamlined the eviction process. Most of what Hull wrote, he pointed out, ended up enshrined into law.

He also has been appointed as a judge pro tempore in the Justice Courts, though he said he’s never heard an eviction case. His firm’s two partners, Kevin and Denise Holliday, also list pro tempore service in their online biographies, as do a handful of other high-profile eviction attorneys.

Their firm — called Hull, Holliday & Holliday, but advertised as "Doctor Evictor" — files as many as 2,000 eviction cases every month. Each complaint takes about half an hour to prepare, Hull said, and costs landlords around $125.

For tenants, an initial consultation with the one local private-practice lawyer who regularly represents them runs $275. Jesse Cook’s office phone rings constantly, but few people with winnable cases can afford him.

The rest are left to lose on their own.

“You see some people come to court, and it’s just sad,” Hull said. “It probably bothered me more when I was just starting out.”

With his first three cases finished, Hull collected his book and a stack of folders and headed out. The folder on top said “San Marcos,” so he turned left, strolling down the empty hallway and into San Marcos Justice Court, where he was scheduled for two evictions. He pulled open the door and peered inside.

“Empty courtroom,” he said. “My favorite.”

'Sign your life away'

The hallway was quiet, and then it was not. The door to Country Meadows Justice Court burst open. Out came a string of lawyers and their trailing tenants, sitting in chairs that looked more comfortable than they were and entering into the most lopsided of negotiations. The lawyers’ well-worn speeches filled the hollow hallway:

“The judge likes us to talk before,” one said.

“I can’t give you advice,” another explained.

“So,” another asked, “what do you want to do?”

Here, in echoing hallways where nobody is watching, is where the high-stakes battles of eviction court take place. In the frantic few minutes before eviction calendars kick off, attorneys stand and rattle off the names in their manila folders. Whoever responds is pulled into the hallway, away from the watchful eyes of judges and courtroom cameras. Then come the settlement pitches.

Landlord attorneys have the conversation down to a script. They mutter an introduction, then jump straight into the case: They’re telling me you haven’t paid the rent this month. Is that correct? The tenant nods, and the lawyer sticks out a piece of paper. They offer a quick end to the case: Sign this, and you can go home.

The stipulated judgments — “stips,” in the legalese of eviction court — often produce the same result as if a tenant hadn’t shown up at all. People admit they didn’t pay rent. They agree to pay a monetary judgment that can be hundreds of dollars more than the rent they owed. And still they have to move out.

Tenants sign anyway.

About one in nine cases that don’t receive default judgments — cases in which it’s likely a tenant showed up to court — end in stips.

“Tenants took the time to show up in court, and based on some 30-second conversation they’re having with a landlord attorney in the hallway, they’re agreeing to be evicted,” said Pamela Bridge, director of advocacy at non-profit law firm Community Legal Services. “It’d have been better for them not to come.”

People who sign are still allowed to see the judge, to ensure their settlement is entered properly. Most don’t. They leave, and the attorney presents the agreement to a judge, who almost always accepts it. Nobody reviews the settlements after they are entered.

Tenant advocates often list ending the practice among their top priorities, describing it as an extrajudicial system with potential for abuse. They tell horror stories of attorneys who encourage outmuscled tenants to settle.

"That is a concern," McMurry said. "But the court can't go out into the hall."

On a busy Tuesday afternoon, a young lawyer sat in the hallway outside South Mountain Justice Court, offering the day’s first defendant a chance to end the case early.

As he worked, Andy Hull sat in the courtroom, talking with another attorney. No other defendants had arrived. The two men sat behind a teetering tower of files, telling tales of trips to London and Barcelona. Then the door peeled open, and the young lawyer walked into the courtroom. He was alone.

“Did you strong-arm him?” Hull asked, spinning in his chair. He chuckled once.

The young lawyer rolled his eyes and smiled back. “Yeah, got him. Sign your life away,” he said, and everybody laughed.

You just move out

All the strangers had was each other. They hadn’t bothered to look for lawyers, because none of them could afford one, anyway. But as they waited in the white-walled hallway outside Moon Valley Justice Court, the tenants formed informal support groups. They traded stories of sickness and lost jobs and took solace in their shared confusion.

A middle-age couple went first. The man rifled through plastic shopping bags. Out came a thin envelope of photos. Proof, he said. Visual evidence that their apartment was collapsing around them. Walls were crumbling. Kitchen cabinets had massive holes. They asked the landlord to fix it, but the maintenance man said he was afraid of their dog. He wouldn’t enter. The landlord wouldn’t hire another one.

So the couple skipped a month of rent in protest. That is illegal in Arizona. They didn’t know. The landlord filed for eviction.

Across the tile hallway, a woman named Nancy nodded along. She staggered to her feet and lifted her baggy T-shirt, showing her newfound friends the thin scar running down her back. Chronic pancreatitis, she explained. Surgeons installed a spinal stimulator in April. It numbed the constant pain, but cost her countless shifts at work.

When she missed rent for the first time, her landlord told her not to worry. They understood. She could pay it when she recovered. Then the handle to her front door broke off, and the landlord ignored her maintenance requests. So she called and screamed, venting about roaches in her microwave and bedbugs on her clothes and a doorknob that needed to be fixed.

The next day, a process server handed her a five-day notice. He explained nothing. She panicked.

“Do you know what’s going to happen?” she now asked anybody who would listen.

Around her, strangers shook their heads. They, too, were alone and unprepared.

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Nancy didn’t know she was allowed to hire a lawyer. She wouldn’t have been able to afford one, anyway. So when Moon Valley Judge Andrew Hettinger called her name, she walked to the bench by herself, carrying the only explanation she had.

“I had surgery,” she told him. “So I got behind.”

She paused, waiting for the judge to ask the questions she assumed were coming: Why was she behind? How had things spun so out of control? Did she have anywhere else to go?

But Hettinger asked no questions. He signed a judgment and told her to move out by Monday.

Nancy slumped at the bench. Where was she supposed to go? She couldn’t sleep in a shelter. Her immune system was too weak. But she was five days from homelessness, with a torched savings account and a fresh eviction on her record. It felt impossible.

She snatched her copy of the judgment and rushed out of the courtroom. Behind her, the judge continued down his list of faceless names. He called a name. Evicted. Another. The couple showed their photographs. Evicted. Another.

Finally, a woman in blue scrubs raised her hand and speed-walked to the bench. She leaned in close. Yes, she admitted, she had missed rent. A medical condition kept her from her job at a local hospital, but she had recovered just a few days earlier. A paycheck was on the way. She could clear everything up.

It didn’t matter.

“You have until June 25 to move out,” Hettinger said, signing a judgment for $1,253.86.

“And what do I do after that?” the woman asked.

The judge’s face tightened. He paused. He seemed confused by the question.

“You just move out.”

Alden Woods and Agnel Philip are reporters at The Arizona Republic/azcentral.com. Reach Alden at awoods@arizonarepublic.com or on Twitter at @ac_woods. Reach Agnel at aphilip@gannett.com, on Twitter at @agnel88_philip or on Facebook.