7 ms·

Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket

47 points by ronlkah 12y ago

tellarin 12y ago
How I wish this was the norm. It's clear that fines have different deterrent effect depending on how much people earn, so why not have them be proportional?
- smt88 12y ago
  In the US at least, our legal system frowns upon excessive punishments without lots of due process (i.e. giving your trial lots of time and attention). That's why, for example, the death penalty requires an extreme amount of due process. Your trial is lengthy and ideally involves a massive amount of proof before you're given a death sentence. It's also easy to appeal. That's actually one of the legal arguments against the death penalty here: you can never be 100% certain someone committed a crime, so you should never give them the 100% punishment of death. People who advocate for instant death penalty for heinous crimes, like murders or rapes, don't consider that. You can just never be sure that someone is guilty, even if they confess, and our legal system has decided to err on the side of allowing a guilty person to go free rather than punishing an innocent person. At least in theory. For traffic fines, you get almost zero due process. Most of the time, you just plead guilty on the spot. A judge won't spend much time on your case, and you have to pay the court for using that time (often nearly as much as the fine itself). So if someone making, say, $100,000 had to pay $1,000 for a speeding ticket, there'd be more due process required. It's not fair to basically assume someone is guilty (as we currently do with speeding tickets) when the fine is that high. Even if we accommodated the due process required, it would add more load to an already way overburdened court system. It's just not possible. There's also an argument to be made that $1,000 is a punishment that does not fit the crime of, say, driving 85 mph in a 70 mph zone without causing any harm or damage. Again, there's the concept of guilt, and whether the radar gun malfunctioned or the cop was being malicious or whatever.
  - totony 12y ago
    With a fine of 103,000$, I'd assume the person would be willing to pay a ton of good lawyers to try and fail the ticket. It would probably discourage wealthy people to drive fast, but the price in trial/lawyers would probably be too high for the police department for it to be feasible (also, if the ticket lacks proofs, I assume the defendant could file a suit against the departement?).
    - bryanrasmussen 12y ago
      Well this of course shows how things might work in one country but not in another, for example in some countries if you fight and lose you can be ordered to pay the opposing counsel. That would nix that strategy if the Fins have such a system in place.
      - zurn 12y ago
        Yep, "loser pays" is the rule in Europe including Finland. There are some exceptions (court can decide that each side pays their own way, or decide the winner can only reclaim a reasonable amount considering the position of the loser) but the frivolous speeding ticket challenge would not be one of them.
      - totony 12y ago
        I'm still curious as to how one can prove without reasonable doubt a ticket (camera?).
  - kw71 12y ago
    Where I live, you can be fined $1000 and confined for 1 year for misdemeanors, including many driving offenses such as exceeding 85mph or 20mph above the speed limit. These punishments can be dealt by the District Court, which is not a court of record and the processes and standards are very relaxed. In this lowest court, these driving misdemeanors are prosecuted (on behalf of the state) by a police officer, just as a non-criminal traffic ticket ("infraction"). Sentencing judges already have the opportunity to impose fines and consider the defendant's means when deciding the amount to be levied. I would personally say that "$1,000 is not a lot of money," and that if a $150 fine for 85mph (reckless here) is appropriate for a person earning $15000 p/a then that actually favors $1000 for a subject earning $100k in an ends of justice/deterrent argument. Maybe more than that because the $100k defendant will be paying from a discretionary budget, not the money for food/rent.
DigitalSea 12y ago
This is actually a genius way to approach fines. If you're rich and you get fined doing well over the specified speed limit but you only have to pay at most a few hundred dollars for potentially putting someone else's life in danger, what is the deterrent? I would love to see something like this implemented here in Australia. Fines based on your income is a great idea, given the outrage some have over the idea of sliding scale fines, I would argue that it sounds like the system is working. If you knew that you could possibly be fined $100k for speeding, would it deter you? Most definitely. I have had similar thoughts about drink drivers. If you get caught being over the limit, you should have your licence instantly taken off of you for a set period of time. It does happen, but only in extreme cases where someone is so over the limit it is ridiculous. If you drink and drive no matter how much you're over, you should lose your licence (a sliding scale starting at 3 months and going up to 24 months). Lets get serious about more than just fines, but people who knowingly break the law in their vehicles without a care in the world.
- fancyketchup 12y ago
  > If you're rich and you get fined doing well over the specified speed limit but you only have to pay at most a few hundred dollars for potentially putting someone else's life in danger, what is the deterrent? Many US states have a system of "points," which are assigned based on the severity of the driving offense. You might hear someone say "He got three points on his license for speeding." The points expire over time, and points can be subtracted by attending driving school (and possibly other ways, too), but there are some limits on how quickly and how many points can be expired. Accumulating too many points at one time (the limit is usually an integer in the range 5 to 10) will lead to having one's license and driving privileges revoked. The number of points earned for drunk driving is somewhere close to the maximum (in my state), and there are more restrictions on retiring these points, so being caught driving drunk puts one perilously close to losing one's license. I'm not sure that either income-proportionate fines or license points are better. Just different approaches to the same problem. Edit: Actually, after thinking about this a little more, I feel that the proportionate fines are probably better. Not all states have points systems, and points generally do not transfer between states. So someone from another state could come here, be caught speeding, and not face any long-term consequence (because the points would expire before they return).
kw71 12y ago
I wonder if there is anything in statute or precedent that prevents this from being applied in the United States. There should, of course, be a minimum fine because it is possible to live without "income." For instance, driving 15-20 mph too fast might be fined at 1% of your annual gross income, or $150, whichever is larger.
ars 12y ago
Simple solution for the rich: Hire someone to drive for you, cover any fines, then rotate them when they get too many tickets (and a suspension risk). And actually, with the flat fines that currently exist do any rich people do this right now? http://xkcd.com/1494/ http://xkcd.com/1494/
- zobzu 12y ago
  at least that redistributes some money to the driver i guess, but yes. still better than paying 200 and not caring because you have million, while the other guy pays 200 and is in deep troubles.
  - scotty79 12y ago
    Additional benefit is that professional drive might drive better than some random rich guy does, so safety should improve a bit.
- bryanrasmussen 12y ago
  that xkcd comic might also be relevant here if anyone in Finland has thought of that cool hack and you get fined even if you have a poor person driving your car for you.
- markvdb 12y ago
  What happens in Belgium is the actual driver claiming it was their Polish/eastern European employee/acquaintance/... driving. This self-declared driver, gets something in return from the actual driver. The fine gets sent to Poland/whatever, and never arrives because of lack of communication between the national police services. The driver walks away free.
aryehof 12y ago
One can surely argue that for an increasingly large proportion of the public, the level of monetary punishment does not provide any deterrent from breaking rules. Maybe I am imagining it, but (anecdotally) I tend to see mainly expensive cars parked illegally in handicapped spots. Income proportional fines seems to me like a fair way to apply a monetary deterrent to people that now get meaningless (to them) fines.
- cs02rm0 12y ago
  I think that's deliberate, even when applied proportional to income. It's parasitical - you don't kill the host, only take what it can afford to give, repeatedly.
- gambiting 12y ago
  But is it really? 10% of your income if you make $500 a month is a LOT, because it can make a difference between being able to afford rent/food or not. But 10% of your income if you make 10 million is obviously huge, but is it going to have any impact on your lifestyle? No. I love how UK does it - the fines are relatively small, but your insurance rates can go up so much you can pay a small fortune over next 3 years after getting a ticket. You get a 50 pound speeding fine,but your insurance goes up by a few hundred for years. It really really hurts. Still, this doesn't hurt "rich" people as much - but that's what penalty points are for. If you get enough of them, you will lose your licence, rich or poor.
  - kilotaras 12y ago
    But the system where both pay $200 is even less fair.
  - robmcm 12y ago
    Better still for some fines you are forced, or can opt (as opposed to larger fine) to go on a speed awareness course. After all the point is to make people drive safely, not make money for the state.
    - 12y ago
asmosoinio 12y ago
Not sure about this particular case, but these big tickets are often lowered after a court hearing: Since the amount is based on last official yearly taxed income, it can be shown to be unfair if that income was for some reason much larger than what you are making usually. For example when Nokia board member Anssi Vanjoki got fined 116000€ for speeding (75 km/m in a 50 km/h zone), this was later lowered to 6000€ when he could show that the original amount was counted from exceptional earnings. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1759791.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1759791.stm => http://www2.hs.fi/english/archive/news.asp?id=20020301IE1 http://www2.hs.fi/english/archive/news.asp?id=20020301IE1
- PinguTS 12y ago
  This article is not about the numbers but the general principle of fines based on daily income vs. flat fee.
masklinn 12y ago
Switzerland does the same, IIRC they're the current record holder for traffic fines. I know they had one in the $300000 range, there was also a Swede who risked a ~$1m fine but not sure he got it in the end.
tempestn 12y ago
One unintended consequence of this would presumably be that many more traffic tickets would be contested in court. For anything more than $1-2k, it would likely be worthwhile to hire a lawyer to help fight the ticket. Once you got nearer 5 figures, it certainly would be.
- zurn 12y ago
  The percentage of speeding tickets written to people with huge incomes is low, so I doubt it. And taxpayers stand to gain the large fine, so the court time pays for itself.
  - hueving 12y ago
    The court time only pays for itself if the tickets bring in enough money to cover the salaries of the court employees that have to be there to handle the burst of cases it would result in.
nl 12y ago
The Steve Job with no license plates thing wasn't actually illegal. He just found a fairly expensive loophole: he just leased a new car every six months. California has (had?) a thing where you had 6 months to attach a license plate to a new car[1]. Parking in the handicap spots was still a dick move though. [1] http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/27/mystery-solved-why-steve-jobs-car-never-had-a-license-plate/ http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/27/mystery-solved-why-st...
tomohawk 12y ago
It seems strange to punish the very people who are paying for most of the government in a harsher way than those who are freeloading off of it. Not saying everyone is a freeloader, but what about the people who have no income? The person could be destitute, and speed with impunity. Or the person could control lots of wealth, but all the wealth is in corporations and there's no actual income. Or, what about the person who has high income, but also high expenses, such as for running a business and employing people? It doesn't seem fair to fine them $100k for speeding, causing their business to fail and people to lose jobs.

47 points by ronlkah 12y ago

How I wish this was the norm. It's clear that fines have different deterrent effect depending on how much people earn, so why not have them be proportional?

smt88 12y ago
In the US at least, our legal system frowns upon excessive punishments without lots of due process (i.e. giving your trial lots of time and attention). That's why, for example, the death penalty requires an extreme amount of due process. Your trial is lengthy and ideally involves a massive amount of proof before you're given a death sentence. It's also easy to appeal. That's actually one of the legal arguments against the death penalty here: you can never be 100% certain someone committed a crime, so you should never give them the 100% punishment of death. People who advocate for instant death penalty for heinous crimes, like murders or rapes, don't consider that. You can just never be sure that someone is guilty, even if they confess, and our legal system has decided to err on the side of allowing a guilty person to go free rather than punishing an innocent person. At least in theory. For traffic fines, you get almost zero due process. Most of the time, you just plead guilty on the spot. A judge won't spend much time on your case, and you have to pay the court for using that time (often nearly as much as the fine itself). So if someone making, say, $100,000 had to pay $1,000 for a speeding ticket, there'd be more due process required. It's not fair to basically assume someone is guilty (as we currently do with speeding tickets) when the fine is that high. Even if we accommodated the due process required, it would add more load to an already way overburdened court system. It's just not possible. There's also an argument to be made that $1,000 is a punishment that does not fit the crime of, say, driving 85 mph in a 70 mph zone without causing any harm or damage. Again, there's the concept of guilt, and whether the radar gun malfunctioned or the cop was being malicious or whatever.
- totony 12y ago
  With a fine of 103,000$, I'd assume the person would be willing to pay a ton of good lawyers to try and fail the ticket. It would probably discourage wealthy people to drive fast, but the price in trial/lawyers would probably be too high for the police department for it to be feasible (also, if the ticket lacks proofs, I assume the defendant could file a suit against the departement?).
  - bryanrasmussen 12y ago
    Well this of course shows how things might work in one country but not in another, for example in some countries if you fight and lose you can be ordered to pay the opposing counsel. That would nix that strategy if the Fins have such a system in place.
    - zurn 12y ago
      Yep, "loser pays" is the rule in Europe including Finland. There are some exceptions (court can decide that each side pays their own way, or decide the winner can only reclaim a reasonable amount considering the position of the loser) but the frivolous speeding ticket challenge would not be one of them.
    - totony 12y ago
      I'm still curious as to how one can prove without reasonable doubt a ticket (camera?).
- kw71 12y ago
  Where I live, you can be fined $1000 and confined for 1 year for misdemeanors, including many driving offenses such as exceeding 85mph or 20mph above the speed limit. These punishments can be dealt by the District Court, which is not a court of record and the processes and standards are very relaxed. In this lowest court, these driving misdemeanors are prosecuted (on behalf of the state) by a police officer, just as a non-criminal traffic ticket ("infraction"). Sentencing judges already have the opportunity to impose fines and consider the defendant's means when deciding the amount to be levied. I would personally say that "$1,000 is not a lot of money," and that if a $150 fine for 85mph (reckless here) is appropriate for a person earning $15000 p/a then that actually favors $1000 for a subject earning $100k in an ends of justice/deterrent argument. Maybe more than that because the $100k defendant will be paying from a discretionary budget, not the money for food/rent.

DigitalSea 12y ago

This is actually a genius way to approach fines. If you're rich and you get fined doing well over the specified speed limit but you only have to pay at most a few hundred dollars for potentially putting someone else's life in danger, what is the deterrent? I would love to see something like this implemented here in Australia. Fines based on your income is a great idea, given the outrage some have over the idea of sliding scale fines, I would argue that it sounds like the system is working. If you knew that you could possibly be fined $100k for speeding, would it deter you? Most definitely. I have had similar thoughts about drink drivers. If you get caught being over the limit, you should have your licence instantly taken off of you for a set period of time. It does happen, but only in extreme cases where someone is so over the limit it is ridiculous. If you drink and drive no matter how much you're over, you should lose your licence (a sliding scale starting at 3 months and going up to 24 months). Lets get serious about more than just fines, but people who knowingly break the law in their vehicles without a care in the world.

fancyketchup 12y ago
> If you're rich and you get fined doing well over the specified speed limit but you only have to pay at most a few hundred dollars for potentially putting someone else's life in danger, what is the deterrent? Many US states have a system of "points," which are assigned based on the severity of the driving offense. You might hear someone say "He got three points on his license for speeding." The points expire over time, and points can be subtracted by attending driving school (and possibly other ways, too), but there are some limits on how quickly and how many points can be expired. Accumulating too many points at one time (the limit is usually an integer in the range 5 to 10) will lead to having one's license and driving privileges revoked. The number of points earned for drunk driving is somewhere close to the maximum (in my state), and there are more restrictions on retiring these points, so being caught driving drunk puts one perilously close to losing one's license. I'm not sure that either income-proportionate fines or license points are better. Just different approaches to the same problem. Edit: Actually, after thinking about this a little more, I feel that the proportionate fines are probably better. Not all states have points systems, and points generally do not transfer between states. So someone from another state could come here, be caught speeding, and not face any long-term consequence (because the points would expire before they return).

kw71 12y ago

I wonder if there is anything in statute or precedent that prevents this from being applied in the United States. There should, of course, be a minimum fine because it is possible to live without "income." For instance, driving 15-20 mph too fast might be fined at 1% of your annual gross income, or $150, whichever is larger.

ars 12y ago

Simple solution for the rich: Hire someone to drive for you, cover any fines, then rotate them when they get too many tickets (and a suspension risk). And actually, with the flat fines that currently exist do any rich people do this right now? http://xkcd.com/1494/ http://xkcd.com/1494/

zobzu 12y ago
at least that redistributes some money to the driver i guess, but yes. still better than paying 200 and not caring because you have million, while the other guy pays 200 and is in deep troubles.
- scotty79 12y ago
  Additional benefit is that professional drive might drive better than some random rich guy does, so safety should improve a bit.
bryanrasmussen 12y ago
that xkcd comic might also be relevant here if anyone in Finland has thought of that cool hack and you get fined even if you have a poor person driving your car for you.
markvdb 12y ago
What happens in Belgium is the actual driver claiming it was their Polish/eastern European employee/acquaintance/... driving. This self-declared driver, gets something in return from the actual driver. The fine gets sent to Poland/whatever, and never arrives because of lack of communication between the national police services. The driver walks away free.

aryehof 12y ago

One can surely argue that for an increasingly large proportion of the public, the level of monetary punishment does not provide any deterrent from breaking rules. Maybe I am imagining it, but (anecdotally) I tend to see mainly expensive cars parked illegally in handicapped spots. Income proportional fines seems to me like a fair way to apply a monetary deterrent to people that now get meaningless (to them) fines.

cs02rm0 12y ago
I think that's deliberate, even when applied proportional to income. It's parasitical - you don't kill the host, only take what it can afford to give, repeatedly.
gambiting 12y ago
But is it really? 10% of your income if you make $500 a month is a LOT, because it can make a difference between being able to afford rent/food or not. But 10% of your income if you make 10 million is obviously huge, but is it going to have any impact on your lifestyle? No. I love how UK does it - the fines are relatively small, but your insurance rates can go up so much you can pay a small fortune over next 3 years after getting a ticket. You get a 50 pound speeding fine,but your insurance goes up by a few hundred for years. It really really hurts. Still, this doesn't hurt "rich" people as much - but that's what penalty points are for. If you get enough of them, you will lose your licence, rich or poor.
- kilotaras 12y ago
  But the system where both pay $200 is even less fair.
- robmcm 12y ago
  Better still for some fines you are forced, or can opt (as opposed to larger fine) to go on a speed awareness course. After all the point is to make people drive safely, not make money for the state.
  - 12y ago

asmosoinio 12y ago

Not sure about this particular case, but these big tickets are often lowered after a court hearing: Since the amount is based on last official yearly taxed income, it can be shown to be unfair if that income was for some reason much larger than what you are making usually. For example when Nokia board member Anssi Vanjoki got fined 116000€ for speeding (75 km/m in a 50 km/h zone), this was later lowered to 6000€ when he could show that the original amount was counted from exceptional earnings. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1759791.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1759791.stm => http://www2.hs.fi/english/archive/news.asp?id=20020301IE1 http://www2.hs.fi/english/archive/news.asp?id=20020301IE1

PinguTS 12y ago
This article is not about the numbers but the general principle of fines based on daily income vs. flat fee.

masklinn 12y ago

Switzerland does the same, IIRC they're the current record holder for traffic fines. I know they had one in the $300000 range, there was also a Swede who risked a ~$1m fine but not sure he got it in the end.

tempestn 12y ago

One unintended consequence of this would presumably be that many more traffic tickets would be contested in court. For anything more than $1-2k, it would likely be worthwhile to hire a lawyer to help fight the ticket. Once you got nearer 5 figures, it certainly would be.

zurn 12y ago
The percentage of speeding tickets written to people with huge incomes is low, so I doubt it. And taxpayers stand to gain the large fine, so the court time pays for itself.
- hueving 12y ago
  The court time only pays for itself if the tickets bring in enough money to cover the salaries of the court employees that have to be there to handle the burst of cases it would result in.

nl 12y ago

The Steve Job with no license plates thing wasn't actually illegal. He just found a fairly expensive loophole: he just leased a new car every six months. California has (had?) a thing where you had 6 months to attach a license plate to a new car[1]. Parking in the handicap spots was still a dick move though. [1] http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/27/mystery-solved-why-steve-jobs-car-never-had-a-license-plate/ http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/27/mystery-solved-why-st...

tomohawk 12y ago

It seems strange to punish the very people who are paying for most of the government in a harsher way than those who are freeloading off of it. Not saying everyone is a freeloader, but what about the people who have no income? The person could be destitute, and speed with impunity. Or the person could control lots of wealth, but all the wealth is in corporations and there's no actual income. Or, what about the person who has high income, but also high expenses, such as for running a business and employing people? It doesn't seem fair to fine them $100k for speeding, causing their business to fail and people to lose jobs.