I liked my first headline better—”Parking Company Apologizes for Ticketing Woman While She Was Dead”—but my ridiculous obsession with accuracy forced me to change it. She did die, briefly, but had been revived by the time she got the ticket. The original headline—”Woman dies, comes back to life, gets parking ticket“—was also good, but the apology seems important. Even though it turned out to be insufficient.
A New Zealand company ironically named “Smart Compliance Management” did apologize to a woman it ticketed for leaving her car in a parking lot too long on July 26. The lot is outside a supermarket in Orewa, north of Auckland, and parking is free for up to 90 minutes. At some point, Smart Compliance Management noticed a car had been parked in the lot for almost six hours. It issued a ticket (the report calls it a “breach notice,” presumably because it alleged a breach of the parking contract) a few days later.
The woman responded, explaining that the only reason the car was there all day was that she had died. True, it was only temporary, but she suffered a heart attack in the lot and, according to her father, paramedics told him his daughter’s heart had stopped and so “momentarily, she was technically dead.” After reviving her, paramedics took her to the hospital. It seems that what with all the commotion and concern for her life, no one thought to go back and move her car until that evening.
As the report puts it, “[t]he woman received an $80 breach notice from Smart Compliance Management a few days after her resurrection.”
Now, to be “fair” to SCM, it apparently monitors parking lots remotely using “ANPR,” which stands for Automatic Number Plate Recognition, which, guess what, involves “AI and machine learning” to read license plates. I learned that from an article published in May entitled “Pokemon-inspired license plate at the centre of another series of wrongly issued parking fines,” so, guess what, this is yet another case involving the stupidity of artificial “intelligence.”
In that case, too, SCM issued notices to the owner of a car it said had “exceeded the maximum allowed stay time.” But it turned out its über-smart-AI-and-machine-learning technology couldn’t tell the difference between the letter “O” and the number “0,” a task that seems (1) not too difficult and (2) pretty important for a business model based on reading license plates. The AI’s inability to do this led it to confuse the plate “SNORLX,” owned by the human it ticketed, with the similar plate “SN0RLX” owned by a different human. The AI can be excused for not knowing that two humans in New Zealand both wanted custom license plates that refer to the same Pokémon character. But its inability to distinguish similar letters and numbers is anything but “smart.”
When asked for comment about the Pokémon case, though, SCM claimed its AI wasn’t the problem. No, this “was an instance of human error due to the similarities of the O and 0 and additional training was provided to the compliance team to address this.” Okay, but if you’re using humans to read the license plates, what is the AI doing, exactly? Responding to requests for comment?
Or maybe they’re using it to respond to emails like the one they got from the formerly dead lady, asking the company to waive the fee. Because she didn’t get a very human response.
“[SCM] has been contracted to provide fair and equal opportunity for parking at this car park. This is why a maximum stay time limit applies,” it explained in an email, answering a question she hadn’t asked. “Customers are entitled to 90 minutes of parking. Your vehicle was parked for 341 minutes,” it continued, also irrelevantly. Finally it got to the point: “Having considered your appeal in detail we have decided to uphold the Breach Notice as we believe that it was correctly issued in accordance with the terms and conditions advertised within the area concerned.” Wait, that still isn’t the point, unless the terms and conditions included “DYING IN THIS PARKING LOT SHALL NOT CONSTITUTE A DEFENSE TO BREACH,” and they probably didn’t.
Finally, it got to the real point: “Due to the circumstances resulting in this Breach Notice, we are able to reduce this to a $30 administration fee.”
So, having considered her appeal “in detail,” someone or something decided death justified a $50 discount, but not the full $80. Sure. That makes sense. But are they also using an AI to do their legal research? Because it only took a human a couple of seconds to find this:
Where, after a contract is made, a party’s performance is made impracticable without his fault by the occurrence of an event the non-occurrence of which was a basic assumption on which the contract was made, his duty to render that performance is discharged, unless the language or the circumstances indicate the contrary.
Restatement (Second) of Contracts § 261; see also, e.g., Gonzalez v. Community Mortuary, Inc., 119 Cal. App. 5th 1006, 1023 (2026) (discussing the defense and remanding so judge could rule on whether defendant was liable for, let’s say an unfortunate mixup).
Assuming the law is similar in New Zealand, then this woman had a pretty solid defense to the charge of breaching her parking contract. Performing it by moving the car within 90 minutes was “impracticable” due to her being briefly dead and then hospitalized. It seems very unlikely any facts might turn up showing she was legally at fault for this. And, I would argue, even the most temporary death of the contracting party should qualify as an “event the non-occurrence of which was a basic assumption on which the contract was made.” (Again assuming SCM didn’t have a no-sudden-deaths clause in its fine print.)
Not knowing this, and obviously not needing any more stress, the woman just paid the $30. The supermarket then put $30 into her account, so ultimately she didn’t have to pay—but under the circumstances, no one should have paid.
SCM has said that its initial response did not “appropriately take into account the circumstances of the case,” and also that it has blah blah blah to ensure blah blah blah in the future. But at least according to this report, it didn’t offer to give back the 30 bucks.