You make a great point. We are all used to dealing with bright, intelligent executives so I might be giving him and his legal team too much credit.

Yes, I am aware that contraband makes it into jails, but it appears that visitor contact still must be pretty relaxed. The water was the biggest red flag/question for me: My brother is a corrections officer in Washington State at the same sort of detention facility. He indicated that either running drinking water is in a cell (as part of the sink setup) or prisoners are allowed to have reasonable access to water.

True that everything from simple stress to certain drugs could cause additional thirst but it raises a prisoner treatment flag. It is easy to say "let prisoners rot" but if you ever get popped for a DUI (I have not, but friends have), you'll suddenly probably get pretty interested in prisoner access to drinking water.

That whole water thing raised my curiosity. The other stuff is explainable. The charge of bribing an officer for water just seemed to be the final straw in me giving this a pretty good chance to be a frame.

I agree Bay County didn't want Joe around in the first place. He was really arrogant and came where he wasn't welcome in the first place, then made it worse by his actions of the past couple of weeks. But if Bay County is perceived to go a too far overboard with "southern justice" in retaliation, I stand beyind my notion that this could help his appeal down the road.

I understand that saying things in his defense in Bay County is like wearing a Gators jersey around Tallahassee. I'm not trying to start a knock-down, drag out. Just saying something seems fishy.

If I were Francis' legal counsel, I'd suggest a nice sit-down with the judge and sheriff and say "We are sorry, we'll be angels from here on out, pay our fines, do our service, stay out of town otherwise... you scrap these questionable charges".

I'll say this: It is a lot of fun to follow. Part of me doesn't mind seeing Francis get the book thrown at him. His company has a long line of very questionable action dating back to billing people who had stopped their memberships. But I don't want to see anyone go down on trumped up charges.