$1.4M Speeding Ticket In Georgia, Explained — And It Wasn’t A Typo

SAVANNAH, GA — A Savannah man figured his lead foot was going to dent his bank account after a Georgia state trooper clocked and pulled him over for doing 90 in a 55 mph zone in early September.

What would it cost him, a thousand bucks or so as a “super speeder” under the Savannah law? Nope. Connor Cato told news station WSAV in Savannah that he was fined $1.4 million for speeding.

The math on that is mind-boggling, figuring out to about $40,000 for each mile per hour over the posted limit. It had to be a typo. Sure of it, Cato tried to clear up things with court officials.

“‘One-point-four million dollars,’ the lady told me on the phone,” Cato told WSAV. “I said, ‘This might be a typo,’ and she said, ‘No sir, you either pay the amount on the ticket or you come to court on Dec. 21 at 1:30 p.m.’”

That’s not quite how Savannah’s super speeder law reads. Anyone caught driving more than 35 mph over the speed limit has to appear in court, where a judge will determine the fine, and that can’t be more than $1,000 and costs.

The $1.4 million figure wasn’t the result of a colossal “oops” that Cato expected.

Because the fine is at the judge’s discretion, programmers deliberately wrote the high number in the code as a “placeholder” automatically generated by the e-citation software used by the Recorder’s Court.

The dizzying figure on the placeholder is not intended as a threat to “scare anybody into court, even if this person heard differently from somebody in our organization,” city spokesperson Joshua Peacock told The Associated Press.

Peacock said the court is working on adjusting the placeholder language to avoid future confusion, though.