5 Ridiculous Ways People Got Out of Traffic Tickets
When we're pulled over and given a ticket, we dream of fighting The Man and all the injustices he throws our way. We rarely do anything meaningful about it in real life. At most we pay some traffic ticket lawyers to deal with it, because why bother? Just take the money and leave us alone.
But not all of us.
You may think you're going the extra mile to fight your ticket by taking a picture of that STOP sign that isn't really as obscured as you remembered, but whatever work you put in to fighting your ticket pales in comparison to the crazy lengths some people have gone to not have to pay for a traffic violation. These are those people ...
A Physicist Beats a Traffic Violation With a Physics Paper
The cop who pulled over Dmitri Krioukov for running a STOP sign didn't realize Krioukov was a dangerous man. Krioukov didn't have a weapon, but he was armed with a Ph.D. in physics and used it at the University of California, San Diego, where he taught physics. So he wrote a physics-laden four-page paper filled with equations, charts, and graphs to prove the ticket was a crock of shit.
I may not know physics, but I know that's a cleverly disguised middle finger.
In the paper, Krioukov argued that the cop had been tricked into thinking he was seeing him blow past a stop sign due to three conditions specific to the case, as stated in the abstract: "(1) The observer measures not the linear but angular speed of the car; (2) The car decelerates and subsequently accelerates relatively fast; and (3) There is a short-time obstruction of the observer's view of the car by an external object, e.g., another car, at the moment when both cars are near the stop sign."
He followed that up with a whole mess of very convincing sciencey-sounding stuff. I'm dumb, so there's no chance I'm ever going to understand it well enough to explain it. Luckily for Krioukov, the judge didn't get it either and dismissed the ticket after reading the paper. That had to have been his intended purpose. A traffic court judge who sits nakedly under robes all day listening to people argue that a twig made an oncoming school bus difficult to see isn't going to understand a legit physics paper written by a guy who is cited in more physics papers than most of us have brain cells. It's a ran STOP sign, not the Kennedy assassination. So Krioukov probably got some "A" for Effort sprinkled on top of his Benefit of the Doubt, and the ticket was wiped away.
"My other gavel is a penis."
That's not to say that he loaded four pages with physics gibberish knowing he'd get a pass because it looked right. Krioukov posted the paper online for all to read and challenged the world to find a flaw in his argument. So if you're a disgraced-physics-professor-turned-vigilante-traffic-cop, this is the case you've been waiting for your whole life. Krioukov is the Joker to your Batman, and he's daring you to come and get him.
Man Buys His Old Car Back to Prove He Didn't Speed
Englishman Dale Lyle could never fully appreciate the exhilarating flirtation with death that is speeding. His Honda Civic was 14 years old, an age where Lyle probably gave some serious thought to Old Yellering that wheezing bucket to end the suffering. And then one day he got a speeding ticket in the mail, which was like telling a mime to shut the fuck up.
"OH MY GOD! WE GET IT, ALLEN! YOU'RE IN A GODDAMN BOX! NO ONE LIKES YOU!"
A traffic camera allegedly caught Lyle driving 98 MPH in a 70 MPH zone. If found guilty, he would have his license suspended. "I have never driven any car at 98 MPH," he argued. The magistrates' court told him he needed evidence.
Lyle couldn't prove anything without his car, which he had sold before the ticket arrived. So he bought his car back for 600 euros. He then took his car to a professional driver and had it speed-tested on a two-mile circuit track, which cost him another 600 euros. Spending 1,200 euros and going the extra mile (well, two, because of the circuit track) was worth it; he got the results he was looking for: Lyle couldn't have been going 98 MPH, because his Civic's top speed was 85.4 MPH. Everything beyond 85.4 MPH was a faint, beautiful ideal set upon a horizon his car could never reach.
Keep reaching, Dale's car. Keep reaching.
He brought the evidence to the court and the ticket was withdrawn. Boom! Justice. But consider this case a warning: When the machines inevitably rise against us, we're going to have to spend at least 1,200 bucks to bring them down.
Woman Fakes Her Own Death to Avoid a Series of Tickets
Death is the ultimate problem-solver. Cops can't arrest you if you step in front of a train and get exploded. What are they going to do, slap cuffs on the sponges that soaked up your body-slop? It just sucks that the dying part is so obnoxiously permanent. Luckily, centuries ago, some brilliant scumbag invented lying about being dead, and people have been trying to pull it off ever since. Kimberly Du from Des Moines, Iowa, tried to do it, but ultimately she sucked at being dead.
See, this is why you always learn from dogs.
Du racked up a bountiful array of traffic tickets and refused to pay them. So she wrote a letter to a county judge claiming that she was dead, and then signed the letter with her mom's name. Figuring that she would need at least two pieces of hastily-thrown-together evidence to back up her lie, she forged an obituary and made it look like it was taken from a local newspaper's website. Surprisingly, it worked. For about a month.
Du forgot that even though she was "dead," she was still corporeal. And she forgot that she still sucked at driving. A month after the date on her fake obituary, she was pulled over again. The cop who pulled her over wasn't stupid, unlike Du. He didn't check her file and assign the ticket to "AHHH! G-G-G-GHOOOOSSST!" She was sent to jail, and about now probably wishes she actually were dead.
When she thinks of all that alcohol she poured on the ground in remembrance of herself ...
Australian Man Reports His Car Stolen to Get Out of a Ticket ... 20 Different Times Over 13 Years
The biggest question this story will leave in your mind isn't how the guy got away with not paying parking tickets for over a decade, I'll be explaining that. The real question is: Why did it go on as long as it did? By the end of this story you'll be wondering how a city's entire police force could have been lobotomized without anyone raising an eyebrow.
Mario Hili from North Geelong, Australia, was caught speeding and running red lights 20 times over 13 years. He never once got points on his license, and he never once paid a fine -- 20 tickets, no punishment. You know when people get frustrated and say, "Who do I gotta blow to around here?!" At first glance, it seems like Hili knew exactly who to blow to get a ticket dismissed, and with 20 tickets over 13 years, they boiled their business blow jobs down to a mundane routine. The truth was a little more complicated than that, but not by much.
"Let's get down to brass tacks -- I ran a red. I'll give your hog some lip service, then we'll do lunch."
Every one of the 20 tickets Hili received was from a traffic camera. The moment Hili would receive a ticket in the mail, he would report his car as stolen, and then would claim to have found it all by himself before the police had a chance to investigate, thus passing off the traffic offense to fictional thieves. He did this 20 times, and not one cop ever noticed a pattern in his record that a brain wired to a particularly stupid potato could've noticed. That level of pattern recognition is used to check if your kid needs to be in Special Ed. after he eats a snail at recess. Did the cops figure it was just a demon car that ate thieves and spit their clothes out the trunk with a burp, like it was Herbie the Love Bug as written by a Stephen King? Didn't they think any of it was suspicious? Nope! Not for 13 years!
It wasn't until his 21st attempt that he was finally caught. The cops dusted the car for prints and found only Hili's sneaky hands all over it.
"I'm here to chew good news and give bad news. And I'm all outta good news."
Guy Writes Passive-Aggressive Letter and Gets Ticket Withdrawn
Screaming obscenities at a meter maid will never get your ticket withdrawn. But if the actions of an unnamed person from Melbourne, Australia, prove anything, it's that you don't have to be vulgar to get your ticket dismissed -- you just have to be a delightfully sarcastic dick.
Didgeridoo Dundee (the name I'm giving the unnamed Australian) parked his car in a space along the street. He walked to his trunk to take out his briefcase. In the briefcase was the money he was going to use to pay for the space at the parking meter machine, which was near the front of the car. In the time it took Didgeridoo Dundee to walk from the driver seat to the trunk to the ticket machine, a meter maid left a ticket on his windshield.
Didgeridoo Dundee, visual approximation.
This happened 40 seconds after parking. The meter maid, shocked to discover the car's owner would still be hanging around 40 seconds after the car was parked, came face-to-face with Didgeridoo Dundee and said, "Where did you come from?" -- the meter maid fully acknowledged that Didgeridoo Dundee had just parked the car and was intending to pay. Didgeridoo Dundee got the ticket anyway.
Didgeridoo Dundee figured, why bother getting lawyers involved when he could write a glorious, extremely passive-aggressive letter to the Melbourne Parking and Traffic to contest the ticket? And so he did:
"Seriously, I've gotta hand it to him -- this guy's a genius. Somehow he knew I fully intended to comply with the regulations and pay for my parking, so he did what any good parking officer would do -- he wrote me a ticket before I even had the chance to walk the 8 steps to the machine & pay for one. Officer 335 must get a raise, no questions asked."
"And while you're at it, make him president of the world."
He continued by placing the blame squarely on himself:
"I accept full responsibility for not getting from my car to the ticket machine in time. The 30-40 seconds I let lapse between parking and finding my $8.00 was clearly my fault ... In the interim, I will commence winding down my window as I pull in and throwing my coins at the ticket machine in the hope that some find their way into the coin slot."
Didgeridoo Dundee signed the letter "Yours in disbelief" and sent it off. Eight days later, the ticket was withdrawn. And so, for the first time in recorded history, intense, highly condescending sarcasm directed toward a government worker actually accomplished something. It never worked again.
Luis is currently falsifying documents to make it seem like his evil twin brother ran all those red lights. In the meantime, you can find him on Twitter and Tumblr.
