who's on judge mathis today? #289
an idiotic recap of the greatest syndicated courtroom show of all time
plaintiff: jessica from oak lawn, illinois. jessica is approximately twelve and a half years old and tiptoes timidly into the courtroom clutching her accordion of truth™ to her chest like it’s a trapper keeper with her social studies homework in it. she is small and has bright red hair with heavily-lined terrified eyes peeking out from beneath a glossy curtain of bangs. she truly looks like she just got out of middle school, like she just got a pass to leave in the middle of eighth period, right down to the black ouchless hair tie (a status symbol for girls with long hair) encircling her little wrist.
defendant: joshua from aurora, illinois. a million years ago i went to a wedding at a megachurch in aurora, and let’s just say that joshua looks like he plays passionate nondenominational acoustic guitar there.
the complaint: jessica purchased a truck from joshua and the truck exploded (???) so now she is suing to get her money back!!
what does she want: $900 (okay………..now the *explosion* of it all kinda makes sense)
how it went down: jessica comes in guns blazing: “because of the defendant, my friend had to jump out of a moving vehicle because it exploded on the highway.” she holds up a picture which frankly doesn’t look like shit from this distance, but the audience gasps dramatically in response. as the friend gets up from the witness chair to describe what happened, the camera zooms in on the photo of what appears to be a great ball of fire in the middle of the highway. goodness gracious!
austin went with jessica to buy the truck and after they paid joshua she drove his truck home and austin drove the truck they just bought in case there where any unforeseen problems, because it was new to them. he says that as soon as they got on the highway he heard a loud ticking coming from under the hood, but he wasn’t alarmed because it quieted once he’d been driving for a few minutes. soon after the ticking died down, austin says smoke started billowing from under the hood, smoke so thick that he couldn’t make out jessica driving in front of him. he’s blasting full speed on the highway and feels the brakes give as he tries to slow down so he can get off the road and assess the smoke, then all the power in the fucking truck shuts off!!!! and he can see reflected in the metal guardrails that the undercarriage is on fucking fire!!!!!!! he can’t stop because, remember, he has no fucking brakes, so he COASTS ALONG THE SHOULDER IN A FLAMING FUCKING CAR UNTIL IT SLOWED DOWN ENOUGH FOR HIM TO JUMP OUT OF IT INTO TRAFFIC WHILE IT WAS STILL ROLLING BECAUSE HE DIDN’T WANT TO BE BURNED ALIVE WHEN THE GAS TANK EXPLODED. $900?! how about $900,000,000?!!?!!!?!! this case shouldn’t be on daytime TV, this gentleman should be on trial at the hague!!!
jessica is in the other truck a mile up the highway crying her eyes out while watching her truck burn itself up, and austin ran to join her while they waited for the police and the fire department. he says that they watched the fire travel from where it started under the hood to engulfing the entire vehicle in flames. jessica gives the judge even more pictures of the wreckage, and i’m so glad austin jumped out rather than end up fused to all this melted steel. what a fucking nightmare.
at this point, sounds like dude across the way needs his ass beat. but that’s not how court works! greg asks jessica how she came to purchase the truck from joshua and she says that she’d met him a week prior when she went to his place with a friend who was buying a different truck from him. she says her friend was happy with their truck so when she heard that joshua had a few more to sell she was excited to buy one. i’m sorry, do people just, you know, have multiple trucks??? one of the pictures jessica submits to the judge is of several trucks sitting in the middle of regular-person-yard-grass, not in a used car lot or a junkyard; does homeboy live in a real life version of grand theft auto?????
so jessica goes to get the truck and joshua told her there was “a tick under the engine” but not to worry about it because it could be fixed. her friend austin is a diesel mechanic and he concurred so she felt comfortable buying it. the judge turns to joshua to get his side of things and he says, “do you mind if i play a little recording? so you can see what i had to deal with?” oh hell yeah brother, go ahead and press play. it’s jessica, shrieking into his voicemail. “your fucking truck is on fire right now! on the fucking highway! hi, it’s me again, your truck is still on fucking fire!” what, and i ask this with all the love and respect in my heart, the fuck does joshua think he is accomplishing here?
greg leans back in his throne (i assume that’s what he sits on) and says, “you wanted me to hear what you had to deal with?” and this dude is about to get cooked. joshua chuckles and says “yeah” like the beleaguered dad character on some misogynist sitcom about to call his wife a shrill harpy. greg says, “i didn’t hear the part where you were jumping out of a truck that has caught fire. i didn’t hear that part.” and yeah man maybe don’t be all “get a load of this broad” about a hysterical woman you sold a gasoline bomb to???
joshua, realizing the judge is an extreme feminist and vice president of his local NOW chapter, decides to change tack and pretend that recording was a shared delusion. he says, “so i had this truck and i put it on craigslist, i started getting texts about it and i assumed i was talking to a guy, then she showed up at my house with that guy to pick it up.” joshua says that he told them everything that was wrong with the truck (maybe he just forgot to say “also doubles as an explosive device”) and that he’d driven the the truck for “two or three hours earlier that day.” he maintains that nothing was wrong when he drove it (after he just said he went over everything that was wrong with it in detail with jessica) and says that his girlfriend had driven it back and forth to work for the past two years. (where, at the fucking looney tunes factory?!!?!?)
joshua says that austin and jessica examined the truck inside and out before she bought it, and joshua says he was surprised “that such a little girl wanted to buy such a big truck.” what does that have to do with the fact that you sold her a literal matchbox car??? he says austin advised jessica to buy the truck, telling her that since he’s a mechanic he would fix whatever might be wrong with it. joshua says that in hindsight that’s funny, because he later found out that austin is “a 17-year-old who hasn’t finished high school, not a mechanic at a ford dealer like he told me.” okay i was just fucking around when i said jessica looked like she just got out of detention, are these actually kids????? but also, even if they can’t legally buy a cigarette or vote, it’s on joshua for not checking their IDs. i don’t know shit about laws, and duh i’m not looking, but if i was going to sell someone something as large and dangerous and easily traced back to me as a car i feel like even i would at least do a cursory investigation to make sure they had a license to operate it? it would be just my fucking luck to get tricked by a bearded nine-year-old who buys my old car with monopoly money and immediately starts committing crimes!!
austin assures the judge that he is twenty years old and offers to show him his ford mechanic ID. greg believes him, and joshua interrupts to ask “then why didn’t he see all these things wrong with the truck? because there was nothing wrong with the truck.” not me clocking in for a shift of tone policing, BUT: this feels like an insane energy to be projecting in a courtroom (set) when you sold some teens an accidental tank??? this kind of confidence should come in pill form. greg says, “there was nothing wrong with the truck?” and joshua says, “no! i believe he got on the highway and floored it, despite there being a tick,” and greg says, “well there’s no problem flooring it if there’s nothing wrong with the car.”
joshua is undeterred! he says he thinks austin “beat up on it” (for a few miles??!?!) and reiterates that he’d driven the truck for two hours earlier that day and it wasn’t leaking fluid or anything. greg, supremely annoyed, says “we don’t have proof of that, what we do have proof of is that truck on fire in the middle of the highway.” joshua pivots yet again, this time trying to see if “well……………….they didn’t call me until an hour after they left” will do him any favors but since both jessica and austin scream “WE WERE CALLING THE POLICE!!!!!!!!!!!!” in unison i’m guessing it won’t.
the ruling: greg says to jessica, “he didn’t give you a warranty at all—” and joshua proudly butts in, smugly yelling, “no, i did not! no, i did not!” the judge continues, “—and typically if you don’t have a warranty, you don’t get your money back—” joshua cuts in again, shouting, “i offered them a bill of sale! they didn’t want one!” and greg scornfully says, “may i finish now? you interrupted me while i was about to tell them…………………………..why you owe them.” yay, i love this song!
judge mathis explains that under the law, when you purchase any merchandise it must be “usable.” he says, “in contract law, that’s called an implied warranty of merchantability.” you know, sometimes i forget this dude is an actual lawyer who went to actual law school. that’s on me, damn. joshua looks like he might piss himself as greg says, “if i sell you a watch, it’s ~implied~ that you’ll be able to look at it and tell the time!” the judge says that if two weeks had passed that would be one thing, but if the car couldn’t even go ten miles he sold them a truck that was inoperable, which wasn’t the condition they’d agreed to. not me playing matlock (who would i be in the reboot of the reboot, SHATLOCK?) but maybe a better strategy for young joshua would’ve been to lie and say that he sold them an intentionally nonworking truck that the mechanic friend was gonna get up and running? that’s at least somewhat more believable than “the melted car in that photo went on a road trip two hours before they bought it” or whatever that shit was he tried. judgment for the plaintiff, i hope she gets to go to recess after this!
did uncle greg say anything fucked up to anyone: “are you an ambulance? are you a doctor? there’s no reason to call you, other than to get their money back!”
*bangs gavel*