Jailhouse Lawyer

The name of the young man pictured at left is Jesse Dimmick.  You have to wonder what his prison nickname might be, given the myriad possibilities.

You and I might consider this to be the idea of a dimwit, but old Jesse here filed papers on a couple residing in his native Topeka, Kansas.  He needs some satisfaction, and as all American citizens have to the right to do, he has gone to the courts to get some.  His beef, out there in the grain belt, is that Jared and Lindsay Rowley broke an oral contract into which they had entered with him. 

Jesse is hoping that the judge will hear him out, and uphold his rights, because there is nothing more sacrosanct than a solemn promise made among adults, and anyone who would back out of an oral contract is just no doggone good.

The Rowleys’ side of all this includes the facts that Jesse took them hostage in their own home in 2009.  He was, at the time, on the run from authorities who wanted to question him in the beating death of a Colorado man.  They would want you to know that they entered into an agreement to hide him out shortly after he entered into their home; for an “unspecified” amount of money, they said they’d help him make his move. But instead, they fed him snacks and watched movies with him until he fell asleep.  I’m guessing they made him watch a Julia Roberts picture, any of which have soporific effects.  The original version of “Desperate Hours” would not have been such a great choice.

So, he nods off, the Rowleys run out, the cops are called in and poor Jesse gets shot. "I, the defendant, asked the Rowleys to hide me because I feared for my life. I offered the Rowleys an unspecified amount of money which they agreed upon, therefore forging a legally binding oral contract," Dimmick said in his hand-written court documents. So he figures he’ll be made whole if they hand him $235,000.  He just feels awful about the bullet-wound-treatment hospital bills he left behind when he was convicted of four felonies in Kansas and then shipped off to Colorado, where they are still going to run him before a jury on that murder charge.

Samuel Goldwyn, the master of malaprops who was a movie bigshot (he’s the ‘G’ in M-G-M) used to say, “A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.” 

Veteran court-watchers agree, the phrase “hand-written court documents” always means the case will not go much further.  And that will give old Jesse a chance to sue his current jailers for not providing him with a nice new PC and a decent printer so he can make his stupid suit look all nice and prim.

Oh no!  Now he’s going to sue me for calling his suit “stupid.”  Well, get in line, buddy boy!

Oh no! Now he's going to sue me for calling him my "buddy."

I can't win.