plaintiff: dennis for hillsboro, missouri. dennis is wearing a cornflower blue dress shirt with navy slacks and i’m sure it’s some sort of optical illusion but he is wearing a white satin tie that is so wide and so bright that i’m sure it can be seen from space? maybe it’s just popping against the color of his shirt but the damn thing appears to be glowing. i gotta turn the brightness on my TV down!
defendant: nicholas from pevely, missouri. nicholas looks good! neat buzzcut with a bright lavender shirt accompanied by pressed black slacks and a sharp black tie. his accordion of truth™ appears to have been ironed as well.
the complaint: dennis bought a lawnmower from his former high school friend and the police told him the lawnmower was stolen so now he wants his money back!
what does he want: $1206 to further destroy my frazzled nerves, nicholas is countersuing for $700!
how it went down: dennis says he knew nicholas in high school and back then he was a “bad apple.” apparently nicholas used to fight and rob and steal and was addicted to heroin. as a child??? yikes! even if that’s true it sucks though that some people will always try to trap you in the idea of who you used to be. i’m lucky that all my friends from school don’t still define me by the way i behaved in *checks calendar* 1993?????? aren’t people allowed to fucking change? damn!
nicholas says that when he was young he used to get in a lot of trouble, and when his sister died he started using heroin and methamphetamines to deal with the pain. he violated his probation and was put in prison for a year, after which he was sent to drug treatment, and now (due to a combination of devotion to his infant son and dedication to attending n/a meetings three times a week) he’s been sober for years. greg commends him on his success and admonishes the audience that this is the kind of effort it takes to overcome a serious drug addiction. i love a happy ending! maybe we should just end the case here!!!!!!
dennis said that nicholas reached out to him on facebook because he knows that he owns a lawn care business and offered to sell him a lawnmower for $400. dennis said sure and he bought it but the lawnmower was in pretty bad shape and $400+ worth of new parts and his labor the lawnmower still wasn’t working right so he posted a picture on the facebook marketplace (i still cannot believe people use that sketchy-looking shit!) looking for someone to buy it. dennis says that several days later a detective reached out to him to tell him that that lawnmower was stolen. (wow, he could tell that just by looking??? that must be a helluva detective!)
nicholas says he got the lawnmower from a friend as payment for “doing some work for him.” smelling blood (i.e. crack), greg asks coyly, “what kind of work?” nicholas says “masonry.” greg says “what kind of work does the friend do?” nicholas answers “he details cars.” you know and i know that greg is hoping this dude is gonna slip up and says HE’S MY WEED GUY but come on, man! nicholas went to prison, he’s not gonna snitch on daytime television!
nicholas knew the lawnmower “was hot” but didn’t tell that to dennis when he reached out to sell it to him. greg, irate, is like “you wanted to put the man in danger of going to jail?” and nicholas says no, he didn’t tell him in writing because he’s smarter than that and didn’t want to put himself in jail, but he did admit it to him when they met in person to exchange the stolen goods. nicholas says he told dennis it was hot and not to take it in to any repair shops that might run the serial number. he also says that dennis had to know it was stolen because the lawnmower generally retails for $16,000 and he was getting it for $400. a $15,600 discount?????? man alive, you simply cannot beat the prices of a good booster! also, is this what lawnmowers cost in real life? like...why not just buy a honda??
the ruling: dennis said he never told him it was stolen, i mean of course. even if they had done a blood oath as long as dennis has the original paperwork nicholas gave him that doesn’t have STOLEN written across the top in bright red letters he’s never gonna admit to knowing shit! nicholas says his countersuit is for harassment, because dennis started regularly calling his job and his managers were concerned and he almost got fired. dennis says he was only calling his job to find out if he worked there so he could have nicholas served with a subpoena. (that sounds so fancy but it’s surely not for this show, right...? clearly i gotta go rewatch some episodes of the good wife and brush up on my law degree!)
i knew nicholas was gonna lose this case as soon as drugs were mentioned, and it’s a bummer because the way the system is set up if you get caught doing anything, and god forbid you serve any federal time, you might spend the rest of your life working odd jobs and making shady deals for stolen lawnmowers because you can’t get hired anywhere else. anyway, judgment for the plaintiff, i hope nicholas is hanging in there for his kid, and sixteen thousand american dollars for a lawnmower????? it better be a goddamn transformer!
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “you weren’t on drugs? he said the police told him it was stolen! that means somebody’s on drugs, don’t get mad at me!!!”
*bangs gavel*