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Comment by thatswrong0 | Hacker News Reader

Insanity. How on earth can anyone, let alone a judge with a law degree, think that this is at all reasonable (precedent or not). California really needs to clean house and get some fresh perspective in its legal system. Sidenote: I really do wish the US followed the doctrine of abiding by the "spirit of the law" rather than the "letter of the law" in trivial civil determinations such as this.

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It didn't randomly come out of the blue. He ignored city fines and various court judgements for 8+ years. Of course the penalties are going to add up.

Frankly, I don't see how it justifies the sum. The guy can be a stubborn fool, and $573000 is still a crazy amount

So then no one should ever pay any fines for anything, and then eventually after repeated violations over years when it becomes too large it should all get written off because it is a "crazy amount"?

It shouldn't all be written off. The fine should be a reasonable amount, not half a million dollars. You can buy an entirely new house with that kind of dough.

The fines were a reasonable amount, and then he ignored them for eight years straight and then argued in court that US law doesn't apply to him because [sovereign citizen voodoo].

This being a court case it was pretty easy to locate the property and neighborhood - houses there are 750k to 1M.

He could’ve settled this 7 years ago, since the majority of the fine was a $250 per day non-compliance fine.

Not sure how it comes from my comment. There are plenty of ways to enforce fines without first going higher than orbit

What are these ways? Send repeated notices? Sue them? Get a court order? They already did all of this.

Also, his argument in response wasn't that the fines were incorrect in any way, it was that the law just didn't apply to him because [sovereign citizen voodoo].

For example, in a bunch of countries I have lived there's some sort of judicial enforcement service which can find your accounts, and issue an order to banks to transfer right amount from them, or seize your car if there are nothing there. Dammit, even administrative arrest is not as stupid as half a million as a way to make him clean his yard.

I mean sure, fighting things in court and losing is going to cost you more money than admitting defeat. However, at some point the council should just say "you had your chance to rectify the issue, we hired a contractor to fix that for you, here's the bill", rather than letting a fine of $250/day build up over multiple years.

He also refused to allow city officials on his property for that entire time, so fixing it for him wasn't an option.

Yeah, I see from other comments he went the sovereign idiot route. An interesting observation is I'm 95% sure back in my (european) home country, they'd just take the clean up action to court and seek forced entry on grounds of hazard to public health.

The judge thinks it's reasonable because he has a law degree and experience as a lawyer and a judge.

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