OMG I'm going to be thrown into the street!

[TorchTheWitch]

191. cripes, he wouldn't even let me SPEAK!

I don't know if this guy thinks he can do whatever the hell he wants just because he's the only judge and runs the district court or what. And yes, he's a Republican. Figures.

There was two hearings. The first one never should have been scheduled at all because the landlord didn't serve a Notice to Quit on me. By PA law she CAN'T file for an eviction until after the 10 days from the date of service of the Notice to Quit expires. I told the dingbat clerk this and she had absolutely no idea what the hell I was talking about. She said that when someone comes and fills out an eviction form and pays the fee she just goes ahead and schedules a hearing. The judge doesn't actually SEE anything since they rubber stamp his signature on everything, so he was Mr. Know Nothing until the hearing.

The only reason I went to the hearing is because that dumbass clerk said that I should just tell the judge during the hearing, and I could not get her to understand that the law forbids a hearing to even be scheduled until the Notice to Quit obligation is satisfied. So I went because I basically had no choice. If I didn't go he just would have made a judgment in her favor for whatever she wanted. So, there wasn't a thing I could do gut bring up the business of the Notice to Quit the first chance I got to say anything. Since she was the plaintiff she got to speak first.

The first hearing wasn't so bad. He said he couldn't accept my photos as evidence unless I had copies of them for her, and I'd thought of that already and got double prints, so she got a copy of them all and so did the judge. Most of that hearing was his letting her babble on and on, which was actually interesting since she's a pathological liar the more you let her blab the more insane her lies get. The judge actually told her he didn't believe her. I was hoping she'd do her full blown psycho screaming thing she does whenever someone says they don't believe her or actual tries to dispute her but no such luck.

There was also the fact that she never even had a license to rent the place to begin with. I found that out from the nice woman at the Code Enforcement office who explained that the reason for the license is so that a township inspector can check the whole property for anything unsafe/out of code, etc. No way in hell she would have passed that inspection. The also told me that the township had the property listed by someone with a different last name (her previous married name) and lived at the address that I rent rather than the home she lives in.

Most of that first hearing was the judge asking her questions about the license, finding out it had never been inspected as well as several problems with the lease and stuff like that. He also let me tell a very brief summary of the story like the things that happened, her not fixing them and my losing my job because of it yet I continued to pay the rent until I had next to no money at all left. The judge closed the hearing and scheduled another one for the same time in a week because he wanted a township inspector to inspect the place and give him a report.

I was thinking "YES!" since for a week I'd been trying to get a township inspector to do just that myself. But during the whole hearing every time it was my turn to speak my landlord kept interrupting me and the judge wasn't doing anything about it! I felt like I was on Jerry Springer! I kept looking toward the judge to see what the hell he was doing, and he was just sitting there watching us like we were some tv show. Afterward I convinced myself that he let that go on to see for himself how loony she is.

Right after that hearing the landlord called me and told me she wanted the plumber to come in to replace that sewage pipe she was ignoring for two damn years! Well, of course she did... she didn't want the inspector to see the one she'd been ignoring! I talked to the plumber myself and told him that I wanted him to come look at it since i know he never had before but that it wasn't getting replaced until the inspector saw it. No problem with that - he's a really nice guy.

I didn't hear anything about the township inspector coming until the afternoon before the next hearing date. I was told that the inspector would be there to do his inspection an hour before the hearing and that he'd be bringing the landlord. That inspection was a disaster. He told me I wasn't allowed to talk to him at all and that he "worked for the property owner". WTF??? He found a whole bunch of stuff that was messed up, but when it came to the major things like the sewage pipe, the falling down and leaking living room ceiling, etc. all he did was glance at it and say it had to be fixed. I swear I wanted to turn the shower on so that water leaked out of the ceiling onto their heads.

Then we had to go straight to the hearing which was a disaster. The judge wouldn't let me see the copy of the report from the inspector, so I have no idea what the hell it said. I was completely cut out of the loop concerning the inspection. The judge and the landlord talked back and forth about some things in the report that I couldn't even follow what they were talking about since they were both looking at their own copies of it and I wasn't allowed to have one.

At one point the judge asked me if I had gotten a letter from my old boss about my being fired. I tried but of course I wasn't able to. I called the bar over and over and only once someone (the bartender who likely took my place) answered. I told her I desperately needed to talk to him, she's said something like "Uh-huh" and I could tell she wasn't writing down my name or number. I have no doubt she said nothing to him about my call. I also tried calling his cell number since he's usually not ever at the bar anyway, and he either has a new one or blocked my number. I get that... he wouldn't want to have people he's fired calling his cell all the time begging for their job back or whatever. I told all this to the judge.

At another point the landlord said I'd never paid a security deposit or last month's rent, and I did and had the original receipt she signed about all the money I paid when I signed the lease and how much was for what. When I tried to refute that the judge interrupted me as soon as I opened my mouth. Every single time I tried to refute anything the landlord said while he'd let her go on and on without interruption he shut me down! I had spent hours and hours for this hearing hunting down old emails and copies of letters, etc. and printing them out that I'd brought to court and even some more photos, and he wouldn't even let me BRING UP any of it.

Then he turns to me and asks me why I was still there when all this stuff was happening, and my jaw just dropped. Had he not listened to a single word I'd said? I'm BROKE. I lost my job because of this crap! The house was suddenly falling down around my ears, I can't get the landlord to fix anything or she sends in some incompetent boob family member to "fix" something who only screws it up worse, and the stress of it all had me so beaten down if the house started burning down around me I would have likely just sat there and fried thinking "oh great, more hell piling on". At that point he ended the hearing and said we'd get his judgment in the mail. I left in tears.

Never could I have even imagined a judge this bad in my worst nightmares. This epic asshole must think it's his court and he can spit on all the laws he likes and nobody is going to even notice. And they likely don't. He's got his court SET UP to run roughshod over the law, and it's not very likely that most people would even know about it. It's ridiculously informal. Nobody gets put under oath, there's no witness chair, there's no way to know that it even is a court except for him wearing a robe. It's just a room with folding chairs and a couple of folding tables. Of course, he has his bench, and most of the time he leans back in his chair which makes only the very top of his bald head visible. Most of the time it was like listening to a talking bench with about an inch of scalp at the top. Even when sitting up you can only see about 3/4 of his head.

Odd is hardly the word for it. In my book it's criminal.