The whole situation was BS really! I mean if you were in any city in America and the cabbie told you from jump that he was going to charge you $50 and instead at the end of the ride he asks for $100, you wouldn't have had a problem with that?!
You woulda just hopped out the cab and hande3d over the additional 50 bucks?! If you say yes, you're a bold faced liar and a hypocrite... Anybody in their right mind would have stood up for themselves and refused; any self respecting individual would have!
What they did wasn't a crime and shame on you all that say that, "They were irresponsible!". Same goes for that silly a** judge who says, "If you had accepted responsbility a lot sooner, you would have been home a long time ago." Those are both foolish a** comments!!
There isn't any reason why they should have had to stay in a jail in that conditon for an entire month. All for what?! An Antiguan based misunderstanding? Fighting a few plain clothes officers who failed to acknowledge their affiliation with any type of Antiguan authority especially as police officers?? Trying to enjoy your vacation and defending yourselves when a bunch of the locals try and pull a fast one?
C'mon man!! Just think!! You and your friends are in the same situation. The cabbie says 50, then asks for 100. You all get to arguing and then he just pulls up in some super suspect alleyway. Once there, these "goons" come out the cut and then try to snatch you and your folks out of the car!! What the hell would you have done?!
Lastly, for those of you who say, "Well, if they had just paid the additional $50 they could have avoided all this." Anybody who may have said that or holds that to be true, think of this! At what point do you think it was going through their mind that, "Man, maybe I should pay this $50 and let this cab driver jip us! Otherwise, we're going to be going to jail, my female friends may get raped, we'll be sleeping in feces and urine, and we'll spend a month in there thinking about this!! Any person with those type of circumstantial odds in front of them would have said, "Uh, you know what?! Maybe I should pay this $50. Because sleeping in feces and getting raped isn't cool!" But nobody in that car was thiking that that would have been the consequences..
And Antigua, a country that makes its capital revenue from tourism of all things, do you really think it was your brightest move to lock Americans up for a month in your sdub standard jail for something as petty as a misunderstanding? Really?! Good luck on that whole tourism thing...