Forum Another Response to the Self-Represented Litigants Study Bradley Marrs writes in his Letter to the Editor (August 2018 Virginia Lawyer ) that “the court is supposed to enforce the law, after all, and when debtors fail to pay justly due debts, plaintiffs are entitled to judgments[.]” Anyone who has ever tried a case knows that nothing could be further from the truth. This statement is akin to saying, “If a defen-dant committed the crime, the prosecu-tion is entitled to a conviction.” For a creditor to secure a judg-ment, it needs more than just a fi rm belief that the money is owed; a creditor also needs admissible evidence of the indebtedness and the amount thereof, including a contractual basis for all interest and other charges incident to the principal amount for which it seeks judgment. From my perspective de-fending civil collection actions over the past ten years, it seems that precious few creditors in Virginia have such admis-sible evidence, and the more frequent a litigant the creditor is, the less likely it is to have such admissible evidence or the means to lay foundation at trial. We have all sat through General District Court return-date dockets where we see creditor after creditor obtain default judgments or consent judgments against pro se defendants for debts that they would never be able to prove at trial, were the defendant represented by an attorney familiar with the rules of evidence. I cannot count the number of collection actions that were nonsuited merely upon my fi ling a Grounds of Defense raising evidentiary objections or sending a subpoena duces tecum re-questing proof of the indebtedness and proof of the creditor’s ownership of the debt. And I cannot count the number of collection cases in which, upon inves-tigation, I determined that the creditor had no legitimate contractual basis to charge the elevated interest rate, late fees and service charges that combined can often equal or exceed the principal value of the debt. Increased representation of civil defendants will undoubtedly result in individuals who actually do owe money avoiding a judgment against them, just as the existence of public defenders’ offi ces has resulted in acquittals of individuals who actually did commit crimes. In the criminal fi eld, we accept this as part of due process and a fair judicial system. A crippling money judgment can have a more detrimental and more long-term impact on a poor person’s life than would a weekend in jail; it is high time we recognized the same due process protections for civil defendants as well. Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg Falls Church 6 VIRGINIA LAWYER | October 2018 | Vol. 67 www.vsb.org