His postal protest was appropriately ironic – he had been sentenced to pay the €292.92 fine for helping a prison inmate smuggle letters.
In retaliation, he threw the 63 kilogrammes (139 pounds) in unwrapped coins into the mail box. A local bank counted the coins for the county court, and found them to equal the exact amount of the fine, a court spokeswoman said.
The court in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia accepted the coins instead of returning them, because “at that weight the shipping costs would have been more than it was worth,” she said.