Does the punishment fit the crime? 

A Florida homeowner faces a crushing total of $165,000 in fines for what might be considered minor property code violations like letting her car wheels touch the grass in her own yard, her lawyers claim.

The problems started for Sandy Martinez when a code compliance officer cited her for parking cars partially on the grass next to her driveway.

Ms. Martinez owns her Lantana home about 60 miles north of Miami in Palm Beach County and lives with her three adult children. They all have cars and due to the tight squeeze, they sometimes parked with wheels off of the driveway.

The town started issuing a $250-a-day fine. The rules stipulate that a homeowner needs to call and have the property reinspected after correcting the violation.

At a news conference, Ms. Martinez said she left several voicemails confirming that she had fixed the issue but never heard back and an inspector never returned. Unbeknownst to her, the town continued to issue the daily fines for more than a year until they hit a whooping $101,750.

She says the city had also been fining her tens of thousands of dollars for cracks in the driveway and a fence that fell over during a storm.

The fence fines eventually totaled $47,375 and $16,125 for cracks in her driveway even though Ms. Martinez says the problems had been corrected long ago.

After eventually discovering the ever-increasing fines, Ms. Martinez called again and passed an inspection. But she still faced $165,000 in fines.

Ms. Martinez says the city offered to settle the fines for $25,000 but she couldn’t afford to pay it in the three weeks stipulated by the settlement offer.

After getting no help from lower courts, Ms. Martinez is now asking the state Supreme Court, the highest court in the state, to get involved. 

“I’m not going to take any more from them, and I’m going to fight them and try to get this resolved,” Ms. Martinez says.

Ms. Martinez is being represented for free by the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm that protects property rights. Her lawyers say the fines are nearly four times her annual income and more than half the value of her home.

“Six-figure fines for parking on your own property are outrageous. The Florida Constitution’s Excessive Fines Clause was designed to stop precisely this sort of abuse — to prevent people from being fined into poverty for trivial violations,” her attorney Mike Greenberg says in a news release.

The law firm says it is not asking for any damages, simply for the fines to be dropped. It says the state’s high court needs to reign in excessive fines by municipal code enforcement.

The Institute for Justice notes that fines have become a cash cow in Florida, with some local communities generating millions of dollars a year in revenue from minor code violations.

In another high profile Florida case, Kristi Allen faced $103,559 in fines and interest for excessive weeds and a dirty swimming pool in the city of Dunedin. The kicker in that case was that she had lost the home in bankruptcy three years before the fines started racking up.

Ms. Allen was still listed as the homeowner in the county property records and even though letters from the city were returned since she had moved, the city kept issuing the fines. The city, after much negative publicity, eventually dropped a case against. Ms. Allen.

The Institute for Justice has also sued Dunedin over its fines. In that case, a homeowner had accumulated nearly $30,000 in fines for an overgrown lawn. The city eventually settled the case last year by allowing the homeowner to pay a significantly smaller amount.