Can someone explain why the courts do these type of minimal fines? Having a cup of coffee on the Bart could land me a $250 fine, which is 2x as much proportional of my personal yearly revenue. This seems more harmful than a cup of coffee.
Unless you are making 12.5 million a year, I think you converted wrong. It's likely 20 or 200 times more the proportional amount of your yearly revenue.
As I said, fines aren't assessed as a proportion of the paying party's income. That's just not something taken into account in the vast majority of instances.
I'm not making a value judgement on whether that's good or not. I'm just making a factual statement about the way the US justice system works.
I didn't imply anything about the paying party's income, I stated the impact of the crime. The fine should be proportional to the number affected and to what extreme, not the income of the culprit.
