Happy birthday - your speeding fine's cancelled

By LOUISA CLEAVE

It began with a speeding fine and ended up with a New Zealand man's letter zooming around the world by email.

The South Auckland accountant's clever letter to police disputing a speeding fine has ended up in inboxes everywhere.

Justin Lee of Manurewa was let off the $120 fine after noticing irregularities in the infringement notice, handwritten by an officer at Pokeno on January 26.

The notice states that Mr Lee was driving at 116km/h in a 100km/h zone on June 23, 1974 - the date of his birth.

It gives the correct registration number but describes a differentcar.

Mr Lee wrote to police saying the date of the offence was of grave concern as he was not issued with a driver's licence until the 1990s.

"I do not have a clear recollection of very much at all before I was 3 1/2 years old, so I rang mum to see if she remembered what I was doing that day. She said that - coincidentally - I was born on that day."

Mr Lee said he emailed the documents to a group of friends who passed them on.

The email was sent to his brother in Australia during the rounds and it came to Weekend Herald staff - who had never heard of Mr Lee - via England.

"I don't mind [it going around the world] at all. A lot of people are getting some really good laughs out of it and I don't think it's derogatory ... it's not going to hurt anyone," Mr Lee said.

He told police he was born about 5pm in Porirua on the date of the alleged offence.

"For me to have travelled from Porirua to the foot of the Bombay Hills just out of Auckland by 6.30, I would had to have crawled into the first car in the hospital parking lot and headed for Auckland at around 1000km/h.

"For this reason, it is entirely possible that the constable who clocked me back in 1974 was holding his laser equipment upside down and instead of doing 116km/h as per the infringement notice, it is more likely that I was doing 911km/h."

This, writes Mr Lee, is where things start to get really strange.

"The car that I must have crawled into had the same licence plate as the one I have now. However, my car is a dark grey Nissan Bluebird SS, with dual cup holders, 1800cc of grunt, air-conditioning and electric windows.

"You will notice that a time-travel option is not included on this model, so that rules out any 'Back to the Future' issues and the car I was driving back then could not have been the one I drive today.

"This is clarified by the infringement notice, which states that the vehicle was a Honda saloon. How this relates to my Nissan Bluebird, I cannot fathom.

"So to recap, it appears that on my birthday on June 23, 1974, I crawled out of the maternity ward, hijacked a seriously high-powered Honda saloon with an automated number plate changing mechanism, drove to Auckland at close to Mach 1, was pulled over approaching the Bombay Hills and unwittingly changed the automated number plate changing mechanism to show the same number as a car I would come to own almost 30 years later (the chance of selecting the same number plate is a mere 1 in 308,915,776 - so quite conceivable)."

The police infringement bureau sent the following response to Mr Lee on March 30: "After careful consideration of your comments and the circumstances surrounding the issue of the notice, it has been decided on this occasion to waive the offence. Accordingly, you are no longer required to pay the infringement fee."