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Auckland man fails to overturn bankruptcy after $34k fines defending $80 speeding ticket
(www.nzherald.co.nz)
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Ah legal systems designed to make people not seek to engage with it to solve issues. Let’s paywall off the courts some more so that only big business can afford to use it.
He is summoned and failed to turn up. Then he appealed and failed. Then he keep doing the exact same thing over and over again while trying to strike off the fee. You can't just waste everyone time and expect you won't get billed each time you lose. It's paywalling stupidity/insanity.
So cancel the case and move on, don’t fine the guy ridiculous amounts. The fines do nothing except make the legal system harder to access.
Court costs are different than a fine.
If a random guy sued you for a nonsense reason and you had to show up to court and pay a lawyer hundreds of dollars just to basically say "this lawsuit is frivolous and the ruling is self evident", it's reasonable to expect that ransom guy to pay your court costs. The alternative is being sued itself would be like a fine. If some dude with a vendetta sued me 10 times over that I'd be ruined no matter the result.
So frivolous, ungrounded lawsuits have a cost to them that actually has nothing to do with the courts getting money, it has to do with making it right that someone has wasted your own time and money.
This guy did that, and has to pay for not only his own lawyer (if he brought one, I expect he didn't) but also the lawyer for the city/police department.
Some areas do have an actual fine for wasting the court's time, so the lawyer thing might not be the only thing going on here, but no matter what, the guy gets to pay more for losing at court when the matter is considered obvious to everyone else and it seems he only wants to argue to avoid a perfectly legal fine.
Yes, and if you've paid a good lawyer they will indeed get a judgement against "ransom guy" to pay all court costs including your lawyers' fees. What you won't often find is a good lawyer who will not charge you up front, because a judgement still needs to be collected, and collecting judgments from random ransom guys is a low odds business. See OP.
There is a series of appeals you can make when you don't agree with something, which is the course this person has followed, and are there for good reason.
The only reason he's in this situation is his own stupidity and stubbornness.
Charging him $110 for not showing up to his hearing seems fair. Charging him thousands for losing his appeals does not.
Lawyers and court time are expensive, and wasting time on frivolous BS should come with a penalty. The alternative isn't fair to taxpayers.
Extreme costs make it too risky to appeal against injustice.
I wouldn't consider these costs extreme, they wouldn't even be the full cost of defending against his ridiculous claims.
They're extreme relative to the average person's disposable income.
And a reasonable person isn't going to find themselves in this particular position.
This specific person in this specific case sounds like an asshole, but people who aren't assholes do sometimes lose court cases, and should have the ability to appeal without risking financial ruin.
Again, a reasonable person isn't going to rack up 34k in legal bills fighting an $80 dollar ticket. The amount of fuck around is what cost so much.
He had the ability to appeal, which he used and lost. Then he was presented with another opportunity to appeal, because often you get several chances for this.
He chose instead to seek judicial review of the case, which wasted everyone's time because it was stupid and inappropriate to request a review instead of appealing.
Then he was fined for wasting everyone's time, because otherwise these people will just keep going and wasting taxpayer money on frivolous court proceedings.
That isn't appeal, that is judicial review, basically wanting the court to review the decision and overturn it. It's an extra step that shouldn't be taken willy-nilly, and should be done when you're sure you have a chance. He already went past the normal procedure and continue to pursuit something as stupid and obvious as speeding fine. The high cost imposed is to stop these sort of frivolous demand, and the court smell his bullshit from the get go as he pretend he didn't drive or own the car.
They're not expensive ant time wasting to this guy, he just refuses to show up.
I suppose, eventually, he will be inconvenienced with an arrest and incarceration.
He chose to keep wasting money
We lived in a city that levied $500 per day fines for some fairly common stuff (like 30% of the homes in the city had the violations, but only a few were charged with them because, reasons...) so, some homeowners who ignored the fines accumulated city liens in excess of the value of their homes. When that went to court, the judges just threw out all the fines as unconscionable, particularly when you could point to hundreds of homes with similar conditions for years and years which were not being fined.
Nah, the guy was just wrong.