Slashdot Mirror
Man Sued For $30K Over $40 Printer He Sold On Craigslist (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader cites an article on USA Today: Selling a used, black-and-white printer through Craigslist seemed simple and straightforward to Doug Costello. It wasn't. What the 66-year-old Massachusetts man didn't know then is that he would spend the next 6 and a half years embroiled in a complicated and confusing legal dispute in Indiana over that printer, which, according to its buyer, was broken. He would find himself liable for about $30,000 in damages. He would pay a lawyer at least $12,000 in his battle to escape the legal mess. And it all started with a piece of hardware he sold online for about $40 in 2009. With shipping and other costs, the total was less than $75, according to court records.Gersh Zavodnik, the printer's buyer, has been described as "prolific, abusive litigant" who has brought dozens of lawsuits against individuals and businesses. He often asks for "astronomical" damages.
Where it's not about whether you win or lose, it's about bankrupting the opponent
Loser pays would tamp down on a lot of people who use the process to punish people.
No matter where you go, there you are.
He's supported and part of a whole crowd of citizens that like fleecing people by abusing the law. Why don't you advocate changing the horrible system that allows this shit in the first place? Sending one of them away isn't going to change a thing.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
or a hitman. most times paying someone to kill someone else is cheaper than paying lawyers
I think I'd rather get robbed than lose $12k-$30k in court. You don't have to shoot me, I'll give up everything I am carrying with me.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The winning technique used by the plaintiff was thus:
The judge, who awarded him $30K (plus interest), acknowledged the amount is "seemingly high" and the judgment "may seem extreme for the breach of contract for the purchase of a printer." But he wrote that he's constrained by how the Supreme Court had previously interpreted a state trial rule, called Rule 36, which sets the 30-day deadline for responding to requests for admissions.
The appeal court noted:
Yes, he did, you dimwits. You sat on that rule for years and saw nothing wrong with it. You saw nothing wrong with it applied by your fellow pedigreed lawyers acting just as predatory — if only a little less obviously — against others. Suddenly, a man comes around filing his own lawsuits, representing himself in court — and you find yourself bound by your own arcane rules.
"Oh, but we did not mean for it be used that way." Well, you should not have written it that way then...
Whether the sold printer was broken, whether the seller really did try to sell a lemon — that's small potatoes. What pan Zavodnik exposed was the incompetence of Indiana's judges. Hurrah for the hacker!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Anybody can sue anybody for anything. That's how the system works. To counterbalance the potential for abuse in such a system, filers of frivolous suits are often subject to awards of attorney's fees plus sanctions for dragging blameless defendants into court. What you cannot do is bungle your defense on the assumption that a judge will eventually see you're being screwed and throw the case out. How is a judge supposed to adjudicate a dispute between two unrepresented parties who don't know or follow the rules, and both claim they're right? This guy got himself into a huge procedural mess by failing to respond properly in his first response to the lawsuit. If you get sued, especially by a litigious moron, hire an attorney immediately. These things NEVER get easier to handle later on, and it is NEVER better to try it yourself first. The best defenses to ridiculous lawsuits MUST be raised immediately, correctly, and aggressively. You want the system to work differently? Talk to your legislators. Until then, lawyer up.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Makes me wish i was John Wick. I'd go waste this dude in the most horrific manner possible and leave a note saying - because he did "X"
No what he's saying is, by what metric is America broken? How do you determine when something is "broken". What does that even mean? If this one thing means America is broken then every country is broken. If every country is broken is any country broken?
None of them would have helped here, since the actual facts never went to court. Basically if someone files a crazy lawsuit and motions you must respond or lose by default. The purpose is to avoid stalling and to get as many things as possible settled so the court can only deal with the issues in dispute, but the "fallback strategy" is not good. If the motion is not answered it should go to the court for a court order, if the court order is not answered it should go to contempt. Having a "non-action" count as admission should be a last resort.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The RIAA should have this guy on the payroll.
Dark Reflection
Lay people should not be allowed to file pro-se. I'm sorry but today the number of lunatic sovereign citizen wackos and basically homeless people filing dozens of nonsense claims trolling for settlements against literally anybody they run into is overwhelming the small claims and lower district courts. It is a massive problem. They abuse the system like crazy and it can take years to get a vexatious litigant order in place against them preventing these lunatics from filing lawsuits. They've ruined the system and the only reform that will work is preventing all non-lawyers from filing suit. The ambulance chasers have licenses they risk. The reality is lawyers generally do no file frivolous actions. Its too expensive and endangers their licenses. They also have houses and assets they aren't about to risk. These pro-se lunatics are literally living in homeless shelters half the time.
Not being able to sue over someone outside of small claims court for a $40 printer is not a Utopian society it is plain common sense.
Deporting what I assume are citizens, over a what is essentially a minor dispute, no one was killed, or hurt in the matter. Is essentially the same type insane overreaction that causes a $40 dispute to escalate to a $30K court case. If someone just keeps suing give them a warning or two that if they continue to do so they will be band from filing any further legal action.
This is not the fault of Zavodnik, it is the fault of the legal system that allowed it in the first place. Any sane judge should have just awarded one of them $40, any sane court of appeal should just have told the person who filed the appeal, stop wasting our time, and charged them a couple of hundred dollars in admin fees.
There no need for utopia here.
and in some case it leads to companies fine print saying we will use our Million dollar legal team on you.
The issue here is that there is no evidence that he was ever served with the requests for admissions (he says he wasn't):
"Costello said he never received the requests for admissions and was not notified of the hearing."
I don't know how process serving works in that state, but in my state there is a record if someone was served with a summons or legal document. It seems inane that there appears to be no such verification in this case.
Enigma
I don't know if I can understand your last phrase. Your advice seem to be for the defendant to give a misleading answer, but "I do not concede your claim" seems the right thing to say and not misleading at all. *Sigh*... English!
The judge seems to think the defendant chose not to defend himself; nevertheless, this nearly immaterial ($40 or $75). It seems the judge is not a very busy man if he wants to be entertained by such cases. The logical thing would be to order a reimbursement of such amounts.
OTOH, these individuals who claim a $30,000 damage from a cheap used printer should be prosecuted by the Court. This amounts to trolling the Judge. It's totally disrespectful and doesn't show elementary common sense. Don't you have some sort of "small causes" Court in the USA?
This is preposterous.