So at this point in 2013, Danny Payment is the sheriff of Jackson County in Kentucky.

For years as sheriff, Denny Payman had received warnings that he was running the finances of Jackson County Sheriff's Department. The way he was doing it amounted to mismanagement. These were generally soft, like, hey, be careful about this kind of warnings as opposed to threats. The audit of the department, dated December 17, 2012, conducted by county treasurer Beth Salley and signed by Judge William O. Smith, concluded that Payman was not keeping appropriate receipts. He was not tracking expenses correctly, and he had, quote, exceeded his salary limits, according to the county's approved budget. Doing what? They found that he was running a deficit in his department of over $112,000. Annually? Well, yeah, in that year. And that the fiscal court had already loaned his department $277,000 to pay salaries, which he had not reimbursed.

On January 2014, he showed up to a meeting of the county fiscal court and arrested Beth Sally and Judge William O. Smith, who happened to be in the middle of conducting a meeting. Naturally, this led to the meeting having to be adjourned with some interesting responses from meeting attendees, which I'm taking from an article in the Lexington Herald-Leader. County Attorney George Hayes said, quote, Judge Smith's probably got him a good federal lawsuit. Yeah. Quote, we had to adjourn because there's no one running the meeting, County Clerk Donald Duckmore said with a laugh. I know it's... Right, because he's still in the Blues Brothers? That's a different duck. Gotcha. I know it's not funny, but still... And then dot, dot, dot. Guy trails off. A number of people at the meeting were pretty concerned that they just witnessed an overt example of abuse of authority. Yeah. But, quote, Payman insisted his only motivation is to clean up local government. There's nothing political about doing what's right, he said. Huh. Payment charged Sally and Smith with tampering with public records, second-degree forgery, criminal facilitation, abuse of public trust, and engaging in organized crime through extortion or coercion. Many of these are very serious felonies. It should be pointed out, however, that he charged them without seeking an indictment or even getting a warrant signed by a judicial officer.

Payman felt that he had the authority to unilaterally arrest a judge and a county treasurer because he was the sheriff, and he is a part of the constitutional sheriff movement, who hold that the sheriff is the highest law on the land and not subject to anyone else's authority.

But he wasn't so lucky in 2017 when he was arrested and charged with drug trafficking. Oh, well, that's simple. After leaving law enforcement, Payman had set up a hemp farm that he had the permission to grow hemp on. Oh, that's nice. Naturally, he decided to start growing straight up weed and was involved in trafficking of said weed. Well, naturally, I think weed should be legal, and I don't think that even someone as clearly an asshole as payment should be punished for selling it. I do think that there are some extenuating circumstances here that I could bring up to judge him for. The first is that when police showed up, they didn't just find weed. They also found eight vials of steroids, which he didn't have a legal reason to have, which is an amount that law enforcement considers indicative of trafficking. They also found three loaded guns, which were, quote, strategically placed in the house to defend Payman's marijuana-growing operation.