I WON MY APPEAL!!

This is exciting. I finally won my case that I went back to Indiana last month to argue before the Court of Appeals. Boo-yeah!!

So here's the story:

Last summer, my landlord client had a tenant who was a total punk. He was, in every one's estimation, a whiny prima-donna, for reasons that would take too long to explain here so you'll have to take my word for it.

He was supposed to move out on the last day of his lease, but left ALL his stuff behind and the place was a total disaster when the landlord walked in to do the move-out inspection. Chicken bones in the dishwasher; a bag of trash seeping on the hardwood floor for two months (we checked to key log to determine this); hair, urine and toothpaste caked on all over the bathroom fixtures, general dirtiness, and it STUNK. The tenant wanted the landlord to let him keep all his stuff in there for two weeks until he could move into his next apartment, which was just down the hall. When the landlord said NO and by the way get your stuff out! because not only are you a terrible tenant but we have another person moving in this apartment in five days, he had a fit and told them that he was the priority over ANYONE else.

The landlord decided there was no way they were going to let him move into a new apartment down the hall because he was just too much to deal with. They told him that since his new lease didn't start for two more weeks, he should go find somewhere else to live. I was given the task of advising this tenant and his mother that the landlord was not going to honor the second lease for the apartment down the hall.

You would think, given that Bloomington is a college town, that it would not really be that hard to find another apartment. Especially since school was supposed to start in the next two weeks, the landlords know if they don't get their places rented then they're stuck with a vacancy for a year. But no. This guy was special.

His mother, who is an attorney in Chicago, calls me to explain that her son cannot live in ANY other apartment complex because he has a psychological condition. Apparently, he was robbed at knife point two years earlier and can only live in a place that has a "secured" front entry. I personally found this explanation to be pretty far-fetched, but whatever. Using my connections in real estate, I found an apartment in a half an hour that had a secured front entry that was NICER than my landlord's apartment and $25 cheaper per month. (I'm not doing this to be kind -- I'm helping my client mitigate any exposure to potential damages from the breach of the lease).

This was, unfortunately, still unacceptable to the tenant's mother. And by the way, this mother is the snottiest lawyer I have ever dealt with. I won't go into too many specifics, but she took a little too much pleasure in telling me that she was an important partner of a big law firm and had much more important things to do than deal with a small town associate like me. Although I tried to reason with her, she and the tenant sued the landlord, and used the "emergency possession" statute that tenants can use when a landlord locks them out. This was creative, but in my opinion not procedurally correct, and so I assumed the Judge would be savvy enough to know that this was not appropriate.

I was so wrong.

The judge fell all over herself for this tenant during the trial. For one, the kid conveniently omitted that the reason he got robbed at knife point was because he was storing drugs in his safe. The judge also wouldn't let me ask him questions about his medical treatment related to his supposed "condition." This condition may have had some basis in reality, but the devil is always in the details and those details are what the judge wouldn't let me get to at all. He cried big glistening alligator tears about how he would have to withdraw from school if he couldn't live in THIS particular apartment. He told the court there was no other place to live but this apartment and his post-traumatic stress disorder prevented him from living anywhere else. When I asked him why the nicer, cheaper apartment I had found wasn't acceptable, he said: "because it doesn't have the same glitter" as the landlord's place and it wasn't "close enough to bars and restaurants."

Geez. I'm sorry. This kid is such a loser. Entitlement issues up the yin-yang. And unfortunately, the judge just SPANKED us in court. I could tell we were going to lose almost from the beginning, and when we got the order back from her it was SIX PAGES LONG!!!! (Small claims orders are usually a one page form). The judge did everything she could for him, short of coming down off the bench and wiping the tears off his face.

So of course, I appealed. In fact, I wanted my landlord to disobey the judge's order (the tenant could file for contempt, but if we won on appeal this would be nullified). The landlord didn't want to do that, so they let the tenant move into the new apartment. We file the appeal, and nine months later:

TOTAL VINDICATION!