Most people don’t like dealing with pennies---so imagine the horror as a man paid for a fine with 22,000 of them.
Brett Sanders of Frisco, Texas, paid a speeding ticket with thousands of the 1-cent coins, which was captured in a dramatic video.
The buckets he used to carry the coins had the slogans, “Policing for profit” and “Extortion money.”
“I’m not a big fan of extortion,” Sanders said in the clip, which was posted on YouTube. “I was convicted by a jury for driving 39 in a 30 and was subject to $212 at the barrel of a gun.”
He is seen filling up the buckets with pennies using a shovel before hauling them down to a clerk to pay the fine.
It’s worth noting that around 1,000 pennies is approximately 6.25 pounds, as about 10 pennies weigh an ounce. That means he had to shovel about 137.5 pounds worth of pennies to prove his point.
When he presents them, the clerk looks unhappy. “I didn’t hurt anybody. I didn’t endanger anybody’s life,” he said.
“It felt great. It really felt great,” Sanders said, reported NBC DFW. The clerk’s employees used a CoinStar machine to count the pennies, which took them three hours, according to the NY Daily News. Sanders overpaid by about $7.81, or 781 pennies.
Sanders said the office could keep the change.
In 2013, John Gately---also from Frisco, Texas---paid 12,700 pennies and four quarters to the City of Frisco for a seat belt fine, which was $127.
At the time, Gately said the “courts got it wrong,” drawing his ire. It seems likely Sanders drew inspiration from Gately.
After Sanders’ decision to pay with pennies saw widespread news coverage, Gately commented on it on his viral YouTube video this week, praising his protege. “Looks like I started a trend in Good OLD Frisco Texas! Watch until the end of the news cast. They say its legel (sic) to pay them in pennies!” he wrote.
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