My point assumed, even though I didn't say it explicitly, that the terms of the contract allowed the landlord to do such a thing and that all the terms of the contract were legal.
It is common sense that when an asset is leased/rented to another party, if that other party does not pay on time or is somehow using the asset outside of the terms of the agreement, that the owner would remove access to the asset. If laws are made to subvert the ability to exercise common sense, that's a different issue.
As a side note, I am a landlord myself, and I have a hard time understanding what motivation I would have to be "abusive" with access to my rented properties. I am interested in getting paid and having my property not damaged beyond normal wear and tear. "Abusing" my tenants would not seem to further either of those two interests. It would be interesting to understand what exactly is being considered abuse. Though I get it is probably off topic.
"The District of Columbia Court of Appeals returned the case to the lower court for trial to determine further facts, but held that the contract could be considered unconscionable and negated if it was procured due to a gross inequality of bargaining power."
"...where someone's consent to a bargain was only procured through duress, out of undue influence or under severe external pressure..."
Not sure that any of these definitions could be applied to this situation with a straight face, but even if they could, it's not really the point. I think the assumption is (or maybe it's only my assumption) that this is a contract that is enforceable. It sounds to me more like one of the parties didn't read all the terms and is now unhappy when they are being enforced.
Lived in a place once almost ten years ago. The landlord decided that because they lived upstairs they had the right to enter our suite whenever he wanted, despite this being completely illegal. One time my girlfriend came out of the shower to find him standing in our living room.
Came home once our door was just sitting open, the landlord had come in while we were gone and just left our door sitting open. The landlord.had come in and went through our drawers and stuff. Didn't tell us until we asked why our door was open.
We had the cops called on us for apparently smoking weed in the suite, we never did this, we also used to watch the landlords wife hang out with her son and his friends while they smoked weed in the front yard. By the time the cops left they told the landlord and his wife to stop bothering us...this never happened.
Our rental agreement was for a year. Our only recourse would have been to go through a long complaint process where we had to have a bunch of proof of this being an ongoing thing, then we'd have to sit down with an arbitrator and our landlord and once again prove this was happening. Luckily our landlord decided to break our rental agreement by whiting out the part, of the one copy that existed, we never even got a copy of it, that said one year, writing in pen 3 months then kicked us out so his adult son could live there. We also never got our damage deposit back with no reason given despite not even living in the place long enough to really even unpack.
In the end it worked out for the best but despite our landlord's continued breaking of our agreement and the law, we ended up losing our deposit, being forced to find a new place and move just after going back to school and we had no real options or recourse to stop any of it. Everything was set up to make any kind of complaint about landlords go through a lengthy arbitration process with the tenancy board and police won't get inolved, if a tenant complains, until after that fails, we tried calling the cops, they said to call the tenancy board.. The whole process for that would have taken longer than the three months we actually lived there and would have cost us money we really couldn't have afforded to spend.
It is common sense that when an asset is leased/rented to another party, if that other party does not pay on time or is somehow using the asset outside of the terms of the agreement, that the owner would remove access to the asset. If laws are made to subvert the ability to exercise common sense, that's a different issue.
As a side note, I am a landlord myself, and I have a hard time understanding what motivation I would have to be "abusive" with access to my rented properties. I am interested in getting paid and having my property not damaged beyond normal wear and tear. "Abusing" my tenants would not seem to further either of those two interests. It would be interesting to understand what exactly is being considered abuse. Though I get it is probably off topic.