Man protests speeding ticket by paying fine with 22,000 pennies and making a video

For all the motorists who thought you didn’t deserve that traffic ticket, this one’s for you.

Brett Sanders of Frisco, Texas, got stopped in his own neighborhood and ticketed for driving 9 mph over the speed limit — 39 in a 30-miles-an-hour zone.

His fine: $212, which actually totaled $222.60 with court costs.

“I didn’t hurt anybody. I didn’t endanger anybody’s life,” Sanders told KXAS-TV in Fort Worth.

He fought the ticket in court and lost.

So then he came up with the next best thing.

“When my fine came due, I just decided I may as well pay with pennies and we’ll make a big spectacle of it,” he said.

He bought rolls of pennies and smashed them open with a hammer with angry intensity. Then he shoveled them into 5-gallon buckets he stenciled with the words “extortion money” and “policing for profit.”

Then he drove to the municipal court office and dramatically dumped the pennies on the counter. Some of them clattered to the floor.

“You all can mail me a receipt, too,” he told the stunned clerk behind the counter.

He made a YouTube video of all this and set it to dramatic music. It’s been watched more than a million times since May 22.

“It felt great. It really felt great,” he told KXAS.

Court officials said it wasn’t against their rules for Sanders to pay up with pennies. He wasn’t even unique in what he did.

In November 2013 another man made a video of himself arguing with officials in Frisco about not wanting to accept $127 worth of pennies to pay for the ticket his wife got for not properly wearing her seat belt.

Sanders’ video set off fiery, expletive-filled debate on YouTube, where lots of folks dubbed him a “loser” and others hailed him as a hero.

“Why are you calling it extortion money? You committed a crime,” wrote one person.

“So you’re the one guy who gets to speed but shouldn’t get a ticket for it because you’re special or something? BTW it’s been done before so the video isn’t anything new and you didn’t prove a point to anyone. Some hourly employee had to clean up your mess because you’re special. Real cool,” wrote another critic.

“This a BAD A** MOVE. LOL,” wrote a Sanders supporter.

“So many sheep out there ... ‘you broke the law, so you pay.’ You all are sheep,” applauded another.

It took court clerks about three hours to load up Sanders’ pennies and take them to Coinstar locations to be counted, according to the New York Daily News.

Turns out he overpaid by $7.81.

“I’m just going to go ahead and let them keep that,” he told reporters.

This story was originally published May 31, 2016 at 11:37 AM with the headline "Man protests speeding ticket by paying fine with 22,000 pennies and making a video."