When Joe last checked in personally with David Duggan, the St. Pete cab driver who Aqib Talib allegedly slugged in the back of the head in August while they drove down the Interstate, Duggan was adamant he wasn’t going to let Talib off the hook in State vs. Talib.

Duggan told Joe he wanted his day in court for the misdemeanor batter charge against Talib. And he wanted Talib to pay him handsomely in a civil suit.

Now Duggan seems to have done an about-face on the criminal side of the matter.

He told Joe Smith, of the St. Pete Times, that Talib will be paying him well to avoid a civil lawsuit. And (big surprise) Duggan is now agreeable to giving prosectuors the green light to place Talib in a pre-trial intervention program, which will mean counseling for Raheem The Dream’s wild child and definitely keep him out of jail. 

Whaddya know. Lots of zeros seem to have softened the cabbie.

While Duggan initially resisted the pretrial intervention program, he now says he wants to move on and Talib’s lawyers have told him their client is “really apologetic.”

“I feel for him that he made a big mistake … but I have no animosity toward him,” Duggan said. “I feel he paid his debt to me and society, and the man is really sorry. And he showed that in the civil matter.

Settling quickly in the civil matter — before a suit was filed — keeps a lot of potentially ugly stuff for Talib off the pages of JoeBucsFan.com and out of the MSM, as all the details of the suit would have been public record.

And since Talib surely will avoid a trial, those who want to know what Angelo Crowell and Torrie Cox told prosectutors about what happened in the cab that night will have to wait until the case is closed and Joe can get his hands on the case file. …It should be worth the wait.