I do not believe it is illegal to ask someone to complete an employment application. Maybe not appropriate for the circumstances, but I know of no law against it.

Please take this the right way. I personally hate when someone messes around and doesn't pay a contractor for his services. I am not a lawyer so, while this should not be construed as legal advice, your answer/grounds for defense seems to have inconsistencies that you probably want to look at:

If you agreed to perform services in exchange for compensation, and you performed the services but were not compensated, you would have grounds to sue for breach of contract. Instead of suing, however, you chose to take down the site. If the site is the property of someone else, and that person did not give you permission to take down the site, then that would be consistent with the claim made against you.

That can be a dangerous knee-jerk reaction. In fact, you may have implicated yourself by stating that you refused to restore the site until you received payment in full. The other party could argue that you were asked to do something within the scope of work for which you were contracted (e.g. restore the site) and your failure to do so amounts to a breach of contract on your part.

Your job as a defendant is to defend yourself against the claim. If the charge is tampering without authorization, it sounds like that is what happened by your own admission. And giving someone passwords and usernames to access a site is not the same as explicitly authorizing someone to take down the site.

By the same token, it is the plaintiff's job to prove damages. I don't know the details, but I would suspect that would be difficult to do, esp. as it was a brand-new site as you pointed out.

Another thing: Are you sure you would want to characterize the verbal agreement as a "loose" one? For an agreement to be enforceable, there must be a "meeting of the minds", meaning that both parties shared a clear understanding of what was expected from each other. It's almost as if you're saying on the one hand, there was no clear, enforceable agreement so therefore you can't be bound to it, but on the other hand, there was an agreement that he breached which somehow gave you the right to pull his site. You can't have it both ways. Your defense has to be based on fact and sound legal principle.

If the judge ends up not appreciating the plaintiff's attempts to milk the statutes by suing for the maximum allowed, he/she may appreciate your countersuit for almost $1200 even less, esp. when your original agreement was to provide services in exchange for a lump sum of $419. Unless I am missing something--was the initial agreement to pay for your licensing only in exchange for your services, or to pay for your licensing PLUS a certain pay rate for your services?