Biden talks foreclosures, child predator laws with chamber

There will be more than 300 foreclosures in Sussex County by the end of they year, but Attorney General Joseph “Beau” Biden said recent legislation in Delaware is helping to ensure homeowners have a chance to talk to their lenders before they lose their homes.

In a talk with members of Rehoboth Beach-Dewey Beach Chamber of Commerce, Biden said at town hall meetings, the biggest complaint he heard from people is that they cannot get their bank on the phone to work things out. Biden said lending banks are giving people 90 day probationary periods at a lower payment rate but still foreclosing, using as evidence of delinquency the 90-day reduced payment agreement.

“That’s what citizen after citizen after citizen of this state is coming in to tell me. There’s people that bought things they shouldn’t have bought, no doubt. I’m not for bailouts anywhere. What my job is to do is to protect the citizens and be a consumer protector,” he said.

As his son, Hunter, waited patiently for a promised trip to Grotto's for pizza, Biden said, “People are losing their homes at rapid, rapid pace. And one of the issues I have, and we tried to do something about it and we did, is change the law about how foreclosures take place in this state,” Biden said.

Referring to the banks, Biden said, “What’s happening is, people are talking out of both sides of their mouth. They’re not being straightforward. They’re not being honest. And they’re being deceptive.”

Biden said the lender at least owes the borrower a discussion before going to foreclosure.

“So we changed the law in the state of Delaware. When a bank now forecloses on someone, before the borrower has to answer, there has to take place a mandatory mediation,” he said.

Biden said the new law was a bipartisan effort.

“This is straight consumer protection and getting people going through a foreclosure crisis unlike anything anyone’s ever seen a fair shake,” he said.

Protecting consumers from predatory foreclosure actions such as robo-signing is also a bipartisan effort nationwide, with attorney generals in all 50 states cracking down on the banks and holding people accountable for the financial crisis of the past four years, Biden said.

“You don’t see a lot of bipartisanship these days. You see it in the AGs' ranks. It shouldn’t be this way. We have enough challenges in our economy without this stuff,” he said.

Biden said what got his blood boiling regarding mortgage foreclosure was stories of banks foreclosing on soldiers serving overseas. As a member of the Delaware National Guard who served a year in Iraq, Biden said during the Civil War, banks backed off foreclosing on soldiers, but not anymore.

“That’s what got me into this. In a big way. You fight two wars for a decade, with 1 percent of the population fighting for the other 300 million of us, and you’re foreclosing on these people? They picked the wrong person to mess with on that,” he said.

Protecting children

Biden began his remarks touching on the recent sentencing of former Lewes pediatrician Earl Bradley. Convicted on 24 counts of rape, assault and sexual exploitation of a child, Bradley was given the maximum sentence: 14 life sentences plus 164 years in prison with no possibility of parole.

Biden said although a gag order in the case has been lifted, he would not discuss the case yet because it is on appeal.

“I’m not going to do anything as far as public pronouncements or discussion of the case to jeopardize the additional legal proceedings we have to go through,” he said. “I’m a big believer in trying cases in the courtroom.”

Biden said his main focus is to make sure Bradley does not walk out of prison alive and to help the victims deal with this tragedy moving forward.

Dovetailing with the Bradley case, Biden discussed other ways the Attorney General’s Office is protecting children from child predators, including a law passed two years ago that handed out a mandatory two-year jail sentence for possessing child pornography. Biden’s office also created the Child Predator Task Force, which works with the Delaware State Police’s High Tech Crimes Unit. Both the task force and the High Tech Crimes Unit worked extensively on the Bradley prosecution.

Biden said the task force is handling almost a case a week and, among other things, uses technology to catch child predators over the internet. Biden said the goal of the task force is to be proactive in catching child predators before they act.

“That’s really my job. I want to get the people before they do real harm. That’s the best way to protect,” he said.