Man handed £1.1 million speeding ticket fine for driving 35 miles above speed limit
A man was shocked to find that he’d been issued with a £1.1 million fine after being caught speeding.
OK, so he was going at least 35mph above the speed limit, which is definitely dangerous, but that fine does still seem like a lot, right?
Connor Cato, from the US state of Georgia, was caught speeding by two police officers on September 2, driving at 90mph in an area controlled with a 55mph speed limit.
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He expected to catch a significant fine for his actions, as anyone in the state who drives more than 35mph over the speed limit receives a $1,000 maximum ‘super speeder’ ticket.
However, he later received a ticket for $1.4 million, and assumed that it must be a mistake.
When he called up the court to query that, he was told that he’d either have to fork over the cash or turn up to a court date.
It’s obvious what he chose to do.
Speaking to local media outlet WSAV, Connor said: “’$1.4 million,’ the lady told me on the phone,
"I said, ‘This might be a typo’ and she said, ‘No, sir, you either pay the amount on the ticket or you come to court on December 21 at 1.30pm’”.
Not long after that, he learned that the fine is just a placeholder amount that is auto-generated by the software that the local court uses to issue citations to such ‘super speeders’.
A spokesperson for the city of Savannah explained that because ‘super speeders’ have to attend court as a mandatory condition of their citation, that number is simply generated by the software.
Spokesperson Mr Peacock said that the huge fine amount is not there to ‘scare anybody into court’ and wasn’t decided upon by the city.
Connor will have his fine decided by a judge at court, and it probably won’t be anything like the million-dollar fine he was initially issued.
The spokesperson said: "The city did not implement the placeholder amount in order to force or scare people into court.
“The programmers who designed the software used the largest number possible because super speeder tickets are a mandatory court appearance and do not have a fine amount attached to them when issued by police."
He added that the system has been in place since 2017, but said the city is ‘working on adjusting the placeholder language to avoid any confusion’.
Still, if you take one thing away from this tale, let it be this – the speed limits are there for a reason, and whilst a fine of millions would definitely be disproportionate, driving over the speed limit is dangerous and could land you in worse trouble than just a fine.
Let alone what it might do to someone else.
Tom Wood