Jury for Eviction Case at JP court Texas

[Marian Smith]

I hung around even though I was not selected for the jury on an eviction case. The plaintiff was a software guy who owned the house with a partner...his opening statement was something like, this is such a simple case the attorney told me I should represent myself, cut and dried, etc. Turns out he had leased to a single female and had written at the top if the lease "Lease Purchase" and the tenant had moved into a house that still needed a lot of work and had paid for some of the work, had been told a price to buy the house ( but apparently there was no mention of purchase in the lease). Tenant had a lawyer, there was all kinds of testimony (tenant had moved in and cleaned up a trashed foreclosure in lieu of a deposit) and the lawyer seemed to be heading towards an argument that as the tenant thought she was in a buyers agreement the eviction period should be 30 days like a mortgage. I couldn't stay longer but I am curious what happened.

[Marian Smith]

Judge said this was his first jury for an eviction in 8 years and said something like the jury would set a precedent, but I didn't quite catch that.  I assumed the defendant had exercised her right to a jury as kind of hail Mary, but about fell over when I heard the document was entitled in bold type, big as Dallas "Lease Purchase."  But just the heading of a standard lease was changed...not even a right of first refusal in a sale was added,  leading me to believe the owner just wanted to bamboozle the tenant.

It just saddens me that Americans are not taught even a tiny bit of contract law in high school.  Language arts should teach Beowolf, then teach a contract to buy a house and a contract to borrow money.  Or a basic lease.  Math should teach train timetables.  And then spend a couple days analyzing lease a car 5 year contract vs buy a car financed over 5 years contract...present day and in 5 years.  Big, big word problem but used by every Texan who doesn't move to Boston and ride the T.  Funny thing is Harvard Ed magazine just published an article saying the older a student gets the less motivated he becomes because students do not see the relevance of hs education to their lives.

The defendant in this case was a minority and unlikely educated past high school.  If she had known to hammerdown a fixed price in the Lease Purchase contract in addition to the practically worthless contract name change, she would have had a bargaining chip or even a salable asset.