Michael Chavrimootoo

What are Stayed Warrants?

A judge in Landlord-Tenant Court may choose to issue a Warrant of Eviction for numerous reasons. However, from our observation, judges typically “stay” a warrant to a certain date. What this means is that the warrant is not enforced until that date. Sometimes the judge asks tenants to fulfill certain requirements (also known as stipulations), e.g. pay back-rent, by the stayed-to date, and if they do, the warrant is never enforced. To be precise, when a warrant has been enforced, we usually say it has been “activated” or “executed”.

Our question as we collected information was a simple one: “How many Stayed Warrants get activated and why?” In this page we explore these numbers using a sample of 50 cases in which stayed warrants were issued in the Landlord-Tenant Court of the City of Rochester in 2017. All the information we have was obtained through the records at the Clerk’s Office of the Rochester City Court.

Using our sample of 50 cases, we proceeded to review all the records attached to a particular case number. These records are public and can be accessed from one of the public computers at the Clerk’s Office at the Rochester City Court.  In the event that a warrant is stayed, the landlord or his attorney, needs to submit a Warrant Request, which includes a reason as to why the warrant needs to be activated. Only then will the warrant be activated.  However, a lot of the records did not have this form on file, only a letter saying that the request had been approved. Using these documents, we were able to infer which cases were activated. If the records did not have any indication as to why the warrant was activated, we recorded it as “Does Not Say”.

Results

From the chart below we can see that about half of Stayed Warrants get activated, which answers our first question.

52% Activated, 48% Not Activated
The pie chart shows the share of activated stayed warrants in Landlord Tenant Court. Only 52% of stayed warrants are actually executed.

The chart below displays the reasons that warrants in our sample were activated.

54% of tenants did not pay the judgement only, 15% of tenants did not move, 12% did not pay the judgement and did not move. 19% of activated warrants had no information as to why they were activated.
This pie chart shows the share of reasons we’ve found for stayed warrants to be executed.

19% of records were incomplete. There was no information as to why the warrants were activated. We don’t know if these reasons differ from the other existing reasons, and cannot draw conclusions from them.
Looking at the rest of the chart, we observe that warrants are activated for one of two reasons (sometimes both): 

  1. The tenant did not pay the judgement amount on time,
  2. The tenant did not move out on time.

To fully understand why a tenant could not meet the stipulations would require a new study of its own. Several reasons can come to mind, including and not limited to:

  • The stayed-to period was too short.
  • The tenant did not have a source of income.
  • The tenant did not benefit from housing assistance.
  • The tenant could not find a new property within their budget.
  • The tenant cannot afford to move.
  • The tenant was not cooperative.
  • The tenant refused to abide by the judge’s stipulations.

However, it is evident that at least 66% of warrants were activated for financial reasons. Future studies could explore this area and explain what is happening and why in further details.