JUDICIAL POLITICS – John A. Mattingly Jr. reviews lay of the land on pending St. Mary’s County circuit court appointment and possible future endeavors

Issues of Law Important to Those Holding Credit Cards Only If a Lawyer Takes Their Side

St. Mary’s John Mattingly Wins Supreme Court Hearing for Client

By Kenneth C. Rossignol
ST. MARY’S TODAY

LEONARDTOWN — The Maryland Chamber of Commerce, the banking industry, major credit card companies, and the energy companies all hold golf outings and provide crab feasts, charter fishing trips, and liquor-filled hospitality suites for those public officials attending the annual Maryland Association of Counties meeting in Ocean City each August. In January, these big business groups do similar hosting of more public officials and legislators with one thing in mind: to influence lawmakers to make things better for their bottom-line profit.
There are no Maryland associations for widows with cancer to seek a level playing field for those who get behind on their credit cards following the death of a spouse and the onset of chronic illness.
If there are lobbyists who argue in favor of these widows and others who are living at poverty level, and it is likely they may exist, though small in number, one has to measure their effectiveness with this brutal statistic: of the cases involving consumers and banking institutions which are sent to mandatory arbitration, 89 percent of the time the cases are decided against the consumer.
It is against that backdrop that the case brought by a Leonardtown attorney on behalf of a West Baltimore widow has gained the significance of being approved by the United States Supreme Court for argument based on the nation’s highest court deciding that the case has enough questions of federal interest to merit the attention of the busy court.
John Mattingly is one of a handful of lawyers in the Free State of Maryland who will take a consumer case due to the beating that the state’s judges dish out in the awarding of fees to attorneys. Perhaps the Judges don’t like anyone besides them making any money, or maybe the big law firm owned by Peter Angelo has tied up all the funds for civil litigants. In any event, there are few attorneys willing to take on big business.
But in the case of Mattingly and his client, Betty Vaden, the trip to Washington, D.C. next fall to argue their case began more than five years ago and has taken them on a trek from Baltimore to Richmond and back twice and if they are successful at the Supreme Court will likely still go back to both cities for a few more years before there is a resolution to the issues.
The odyssey began when Betty Vaden, whose steelworker husband had died of asbestos poisoning from his job at the shipyard, became ill herself and struggled to pay her bills when she lost her job. Vaden had a credit card with $4,000 owed on it. She fell behind in her payments, and before long, the Discover credit card company, through their mob-type application of interest rates which would make Tony Soprano jealous, applied interest charges after fees after penalties and brought the total up to $10,000.
Since Vaden couldn’t pay, and it wouldn’t look good for Discover Card to send out a hit man, the banking firm filed a suit against the woman instead.
Vaden and her husband had raised five sons and, during their lives together, had managed to move out of their row house in Baltimore and buy a single-family home in West Baltimore, complete with their own yard.
Now, Vaden’s home was in danger from the civil suit filed by Discover. Like many consumers, Vaden felt she had no option and didn’t contest the suit. A Rockville law firm that specializes in buying up such judgments at big discounts bought hers.
At this point, Vaden, seeking legal help, was directed to Mattingly, and he reviewed the case and found issues of law which interested him, as he could see issues in the case where a helpless widow might be saved from losing her home, and which made the boring matters of law have human appeal.
Mrs. Vaden, suffering from diabetes and other related illnesses, a woman who lived a lifetime on the right side of the street, raising her family and paying off her modest home, now facing losing that home to a bank which Mattingly alleges violated the law by shuffling her loan out of Maryland to a Delaware corporation that acts a shill in this shell game. This shell game is worth a lot of money to the Discover bank and credit card conglomerate, as they have shelled out big bucks for five years to high-priced law firms and are, along with Mattingly, going to argue their side of the case to the Supreme Court.
It seems that Maryland law actually does provide some protection to consumers, sometimes, and Mattingly found protection in the law. However, a loophole in the law allows banks to import laws from other states that are favorable to them into Maryland.
Since credit card companies can raise a cardholder’s interest rate for just about any reason, likely including finding out a cardholder prefers brown shoes to black ones, the Discover folks discovered ways to not only raise Mrs. Vaden’s interest but also evade responsibility for their mischief.

“I saw all this and sued them,” said John Mattingly last week in his small office in the county seat of Leonardtown as he helped his wife take their three children out to her car after an afterschool session of coloring on Dad’s conference table. “I said that Discover doesn’t get the protection of a bank because they are not a bank, and they even admitted they are not a bank.”
Mattingly has sued Discover as a class action on behalf of all Marylanders who have been charged high interest.
Mattingly is adamant on the issue of compelled arbitration.
“The only true Democracy in action is what takes place with a jury in Circuit Court, and that is one of the key issues we are fighting over,” said Mattingly. “They said we can compel arbitration and I said no.”
Asked if the credit card company had made an offer to settle, Mattingly said that he would respect his client’s wishes, but he knows that fighting them the way they have has been the best course of action.
“Justice is served by those who read the law and protect the law in a courtroom; that is where the law lives. We don’t accomplish anything for our clients by settling issues of importance,” said Mattingly. “My client has confidence in my work on her behalf, and she knows this is now more than just to save her house; this is about making big corporations obey the law.”