Courtroom Drama

[LadyofArc]

I am one of those weird people who browses the Austlii website to read up on some of the juicier court cases (it also allows for me to actually make my own decisions on a case rather than blindly blaming someone). And I found a good one today.

To sum up:

- Guy files a discrimination suit against a restaurant, claiming that he was discriminated on various grounds and hoping that the restaurant would essentially pay him a large sum of money to avoid having to actually go to court.

- Restaurant does go to court, guy is a no-show, case gets dismissed and Guy gets ordered to pay court costs.

- Guy sends several abusive emails to the restaurant AND the courthouse, claiming that the court are discriminating against him because him needing to do things like file an affidavit were "discriminatory" somehow (yet he has no problem filing lengthy emails and knows who to actually email, which the court pointed out)

- Restaurant comes back to court now going after the guy for failure to pay their court costs. Now, the courts here are not unreasonable. If you have a genuine reason as to why you can't pay, you need to actually prove that by filling in a form for you to be deemed exempt and include the evidence to prove it (and the evidence can literally be something as simple as "I am on a welfare payment, he's the proof from the welfare office"). If the guy had actually gotten his ass into court, he could've even had help with filling the form in correctly.

- Guy gets issued a summons to work out an arrangement in regards to his failure to pay.

- Guy actually responds to the summons (albeit via phonelink), then once the restaurant's lawyer starts his spiel, immediately makes a threat over the phone to kill said lawyer, makes yet another statement about how he's being hard done by and hangs up.

Let me repeat that: Guy thinks that it's a fantastic idea to make a threat over the phone to a federal courtroom.

- End result: warrant gets issued for his arrest for failure to pay the outstanding court costs, gets ANOTHER load of court costs slapped on him, that phone call and the transcript of the court case gets passed onto the local police to see if he can't be slapped with a harassment charge and he's also looking at a contempt of court charge (which can lead to a fine or jail term )

(To clarify, the arrest in this case is purely to force him to appear before the court to work out a) a payment arrangement and b) actually make it clear that they're not there to be his enforcers, if he wants their help, he needs to actually ask for it)

[Pixelated]

Is he one of those sovereign citizens who think rules don't apply to him?

Or just a lazy ass who figured it would all go away on its own if he ignored it hard enough?

[MoonCat]

I vote for option 3: Total asshat who thought he found a way to make some unearned money and got pissed when it didn't work.

[morgana]

Weapons grade entitlement . . .

[Mental_Mouse]

I vote for option 3: Total asshat who thought he found a way to make some unearned money and got pissed when it didn't work.

And too lazy to follow through on his own scam. It you actually know what you're doing (and remember the Gambler's Song), it actually is possible to occasionally get an unearned judgement that way -- but you need to pick your victim, do your paperwork, and know when to back down. No-showing at your own complaint hearing is not a good tactic, especially when your victim does show up. What you're hoping for is the other way around!

[LadyofArc]

I vote for option 3: Total asshat who thought he found a way to make some unearned money and got pissed when it didn't work.

Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner!

And too lazy to follow through on his own scam. It you actually know what you're doing (and remember the Gambler's Song), it actually is possible to occasionally get an unearned judgement that way -- but you need to pick your victim, do your paperwork, and know when to back down. No-showing at your own complaint hearing is not a good tactic, especially when your victim does show up. What you're hoping for is the other way around!

Funny you mention that - he has tried this multiple times with multiple companies over the years, most of them large ones. I will say that in this instance he's not faking the grounds for him filing (I'm keeping it deliberately vague as to what those grounds are), but I do very much doubt the actual situations he's claiming happened.

In those instances I've mentioned above, his MO has been pretty much identical - doesn't show up at court, doesn't file anything, case gets dismissed, he gets forced to pay the court costs. Judging by the lack of followup *on* those cases however, I'd say that either the company figured that it wasn't worth going after him for the paltry sum that the court ordered or he actually bothered to file the exemption paperwork.

There's another instance I found at a state level where he tried to file a discrimination suit against the local DMV because he needed a medical exam to prove he was fit to drive. In that instance, he did provide evidence to the court to prove his grounds were valid, although the actual case wound up being dismissed. From the looks of things, his behaviour's actually gotten worse over the years and I can only guess that this may have been the trigger

[Mental_Mouse]

He might be cargo-culting off a real (more successful) scammer.

[taxguykarl]

In those instances I've mentioned above, his MO has been pretty much identical - doesn't show up at court, doesn't file anything, case gets dismissed, he gets forced to pay the court costs.

There is the loser pays provision in your neck of the woods, right? If not, we have a good argument for it here

[LadyofArc]

There is the loser pays provision in your neck of the woods, right? If not, we have a good argument for it here

Not quite - it depends on the court over here and the judge has every right to say that there's no order for costs if they can determine that the claim was filed entirely in good faith or if there's grounds for an exemption.

The guy has a major EW complex - not sure if there's something else at play or not, but I also know that those kinds of things are no excuse for this behaviour. Bizarrely enough, while he's been quite vicious and nasty towards the judges and lawyers in one of the courts, he's been strangely polite to one of the judges in the appeal court his cases end up in (the judge isn't buying it though and has been pointing out exactly what the guy has been doing) . Either way, it's definitely one that I'll be keeping an eye on