Victory in Court

I won a trial on a restraining order today. I was nervous, as I was up against an attorney who has been a certified family law specialist for 10 years. She was pretty aggressive, too. Because we wouldn't agree with her client's demands of "no visitation except every other weekend", she kept saying, "Let's go to trial" as if she knew that I was petrified of going to trial and might concede to her client's wishes.

After she finished putting on her case, and after I poked several serious holes in her client's testimony, the judge mentally nudged me and asked if I wanted to make a motion. I'm no dummy. I immediately moved for a dismissal based on a lack of evidence.

See, technically, the next thing that would happen is I would then put on my case, and I was going to put my client on the stand to give his side of the whole story. But when the judge asked if I wanted to make a motion, I knew that the judge had already ruled in our favor and so I made the motion and the judge said he was going to grant it, and here's why:

While my client had taken her cell phone and tried to leave the house with it, she actually chased after him to try to get it back. She chased him down the stairs, blocked the front door, chased him out the back door when he chose to leave that way, and chased him into his car and clawed after him to try to get her phone back. The judge said that whether my client took the phone was beside the point. He was trying to leave and she was the aggressor.

It was kind of funny, really. The wife had put in her declaration that my client wouldn't allow her to have friends, and wouldn't let her have any money or credit cards. However, I presented her with a credit card statement that showed purchases she had made in the last month, and I also got her to admit that she had been out with friends several times since January.

Oh, yeah, let me dumb this down for OCD:

Today I went to court and we had a good time pointing and yelling and gnashing our teeth. And when it was all over, we all went home. The end.