*edit* I guess I should be more specific:
My husband is in the Marines and does contracting on the side. He worked for awhile for this lady that owns the UPS store, and she wanted to have a barn built on her property, and she hired him as the general contractor. It was more a favor than anything else and he was working for a fraction of the cost it would take to hire someone else...roughly 5 grand between himself and whomever he hired on as a welder.
So everything is going fine and he has his friend Chris, who's another Marine that he works with, but also a licensed welder in the state of Texas, to do the welding for $1100 (which was pretty much Chris doing him a favor since he would normally get paid TONS more than that). So the job drags on, due to adverse weather conditions (this was back in October-December), and Lorry, who is the customer, starts to get really impatient...and starts having other people work on the site. At this point I told my husband just to walk away from the job because it was going to get messed up if people that weren't qualified were messing with it, but he didn't want to because he worked for her and didn't want to get a bad reputation. Anyway, Dec 4th was the day they had planned to pour concrete, but our daughter was born on the third. The weather was rainy and a terrible day to pour anyway, so my husband called and cancelled the job, but Lorry insisted on having it done that day and called some other people out herself to do it. Not wanting to have his work site messed up and be held responsible, my husband left to supervise, but by the time he got there it was already half poured, and the friend of theirs that was doing the job kept adding water to the mix. In the end it took 2 days longer than it should have to set because of all the added water, and they blamed my husband for it. That was really a tangent to show what kind of people they are, because that's not what landed us in court.
Lorry had paid my husband to hire a welder to put up the frame. So as mentioned before, he got his buddy Chris to do it. About 3/4's of the way into putting up the skeleton of the barn, Lorry had one of the other guys, Derrick, who works for her at the UPS store do some welding too (he's not licensed), and Chris walked off the job, stating that he could no longer weld on a job that another welder had worked on because if there was a problem he could lose his licence, not to mention that Lorry had rented unsafe equipment for my husband and Chris to use.
Fast forward about a week, Lorry says she wants to cancel the job, but that she wants the money back for Chris because she's going to use it to pay Derrick to finish the welding. Chris doesn't have it to give back because his ex-girlfriend wrote bad checks and he's having to pay back the amount to the bank, and he did more than $1100 worth of work anyway.
Fast forward again, Lorry takes Chris to small claims court for the amount of $1100 and the judge in Ballinger, TX rules in Chris's favor stating that he did more than enough work to deserve the money.
3 weeks later, instead of appealing, she takes my husband to court for th $1100, and the SAME judge rules that my husband has to pay back the money, even though he had just said that Chris deserved it.
So here's the thing: the judge who's name is Greg Lange, and Lorry, kept accidentally calling each other by thier first names. That's pretty fucking suspicious to me. Ballinger is SMALL - and they have a total good ole' boy network going on out there. I think the reason that Chris may have gotten the ruling in the first trial was because he's also from the area, but my husband is an outside completely.
We thought about appealing but we'd have to put up double the bond money: $2200 and I mean really, what are the odds of us winning? I called out today and talked to one of the judges out there, and he sounded like just about fucking redneck hick.
I forgot to add that as my husband and Chris were leaving the courthouse, Lorry and her witness (there's so much I keep leaving out; she had this witness who blatently lied under oath, saying that he did half the work that my husband did) were walking in front and Chris asked my husband why he didn't appeal, and he said "because they'll just lie more" and the redneck jackass that Lorry had with her turned around and said "do we have a problem here?" to which my husband replied "you're fucking a right we have a problem", and the guy says "I'm calling Robert." I guess "Robert" is a cop on the Ballinger force and by the time I get outside there are like 8 cops there. Typical small town bullshit where they have nothing better to do so everymutherfuckingone of them came on down because they thought there was a 'fight in the parking lot'. After statements were taken, one of the cops comes over to my husband and informs us that Lorry and dumbfuck "don't want to press charges" - can you fucking believe that??! For "disorderly conduct" because my husband 'cursed' at them. First of all (correct me if I'm wrong, a civilian cannot charge another with disorderly conduct, that has to be done by the state, and only if they witness it) (?).
So what do we do??? I looked up on a website for the State Commision on Judicial Conduct to see about filing a complaint against the judge for being unprofessional in the courtroom, and changing his ruling on the same subject....but if that doesn't go through we'll just have to go ahead and make payment arrangements, which brings me to another question: I know generally in situations like this they can only make you pay as much as you can....how do they know how much you can? I'd love to pay her $1 a month until all $1100 are paid off. So what if they make you pay $100 a month but you really can't...will they consider you delinquent if you can't make that payment but pay SOMETHING on it? This fucking judge but out a national dealiebopper that makes it so my husband can't get his Oregon Contractor's License until he's paying on this debt.
*On a side note: The reason this is so totally lame is that my husband has done SO much for this bitch: he fixed her car for a fraction of the price of what the dealership quoted, he got up on the roof and fixed her sign when it went out, he did her electrical in her store, he bid on stuff on Ebay for her because she didn't have an account, he did advertising for her store to include making up fliers on the computer and handing them out with business cards.
He also worked for her under the table at the store, so the first thing I did was to report her to the IRS for tax fraud when I heard that he got a subpeona in the mail...because as an employer she's required to furnish her employees with a W-2 etc.
I'd love to put a molotov cocktail through the front window of her business, but can anyone think of any legal action I can take that would help us out?
Oh I can't, it will get deleted.
