For many drivers, just the prospect of receiving a speeding ticket is an incredibly infuriating one. However, one Texas man, found guilty of speeding following contesting his ticket has taken his anger to the next level, paying for his speeding ticket with a total of 22,000 pennies. According to Yahoo News, Brett Sanders from Frisco documented his efforts through a video posted to YouTube, where’s seen paying the fine in person with 22,000 pennies, along with buckets labelled with “Policing for profit” and “Extortion money”.
Sanders used the video to provide some background into his case, telling viewers that he isn’t a fan of exertion, which is what he believes this is a case of. Explaining the ruling, Sanders tells viewers “I was convicted by a jury for driving 39 in a 30 and was subject to $212 at the barrel of a gun.”
The five-minute clip shared to YouTube shows Texas resident, Brett Sanders picking up the value of his fine in pennies from the local bank. He then fills two large buckets with those pennies with a shovel, before hailing them down to the county clerk’s office to pay the fine. It goes without saying that the Clerk was incredibly displeased as Sanders poured hundreds of dollars’ worth of pennies onto the desk before her.
Sanders was pretty pleased by his efforts, which led to employees at the county clerk’s office having to take the change to a local CoinStar machine to count it, where they found Sanders had overpaid by $7.81. Sanders reportedly said that he’d allow the clerk’s office to keep the extra, meaning that he had eventually overpaid the speeding ticket that he didn’t wish to pay in the first place.
Speeding tickets are a huge topic of controversy across the globe, and this Texas man could have had it an awful lot worse if he were paying a speeding fine in Europe. It’s not uncommon for many European countries to determine the value of a speeding ticket depending on the income of an individual. According to Gear Heads, a millionaire in Finland was instructed to pay a $60,000 speeding ticket, which was roughly around 0.0085% of his wealth, or is equivalent to $510, for someone earning $60,000 in a year.
Speaking about his case on Facebook, the millionaire slammed the Finnish government, saying that the country is impossible to live in for people with high incomes and wealth, however, very few were sympathetic to his cause.
Brett Sanders certainly isn’t the first disgruntled recipient of a speeding ticket to take the approach of paying for that fine in pennies. However, many first turn to the appeals process to argue that their fine is unjust.
Meanwhile, in Wellington County in Canada, 200 speeding tickets were issued in one week in an effort to crack down on speeding. Many see the process of issuing speeding tickets as an effective way to prevent deaths as a result of speed, whilst others are less pleased by the idea, slamming it as unnecessary policing