Post by Admin on Aug 4, 2022 12:06:20 GMT -4
Brittney Griner learned Thursday how long she could be locked away in Russian prison if the Biden administration can’t broker a deal to secure her release.
A Russian judge found Griner guilty of drug possession and smuggling with criminal intent and handed down a 9-year sentence, just shy of the maximum 10 years that she was eligible to receive. Griner was also fined 1 million rubles, roughly $16,300 US dollars.
As the judge announced Griner’s verdict in Russian, a translator relayed what was said to the WNBA star. Sitting inside a courtroom cell, a silent, stone-faced Griner listened with her lips pursed and her hands clasped in front of her.
Standing outside the courthouse, Elizabeth Rood, Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, called the ruling a "miscarriage of justice."
"Secretary of State Blinken, President Biden's national security team and the entire American government remain committed to bringing Miss Griner home safely to her family, friends and loved ones," Rood said.
In a joint statement, Griner's attorneys Maria Blagovolina and Alexander Boykov said they were "disappointed by the verdict."
"As legal professionals, we believe that the court should be fair to everyone regardless of nationality. The court completely ignored all the evidence of the defense, and most importantly, the guilty plea," they said via the statement. "This contradicts the existing legal practice. Taking into account the amount of the substance (not to mention the defects of the expertise) and the plea, the verdict is absolutely unreasonable. We will certainly file an appeal."
Griner’s sentence comes nearly six months after she flew into a Moscow airport and Russian customs officials allegedly found .702 grams of cannabis oil in her luggage. That’s less than the weight of a pen cap or a stick of gum, yet prosecutors alleged it was enough to meet the “significant amount” threshold under Russian law and asked the judge to sentence Griner to 9½ years in prison.
In her final statement to the judge at the end of closing arguments on Thursday, an emotional Griner stood inside her defendant’s cage at the back of the tiny courtroom and issued a heartfelt plea for leniency. Reiterating once more that she accidentally put the cannabis oil in her bag while packing too quickly, Griner took responsibility for her "mistake" and apologized to her family, her teammates and her Russian club for "the embarrassment I brought on them."
"I never meant to hurt anybody," she said. "I never meant to put in jeopardy the Russian population. I never meant to break any laws here. I made an honest mistake and I hope that, in your ruling, that it doesn’t end my life here.
"I know that everybody keeps talking about political pawn and politics, but I hope that is far from this courtroom. I want to say again that I had no intent of breaking Russian laws. I had no intent. I did not conspire or plan to commit this crime."
That Griner’s words fell on deaf ears was no surprise. Experts in Russian foreign policy and hostage negotiations have said for weeks that a guilty verdict was inevitable and a long sentence was nearly as certain.
Yuval Weber, an expert in Russian military and political strategy, told Yahoo Sports last week that he expected Griner to receive the maximum possible sentence or close to it. The way Weber saw it, Russian government officials would dictate the length of Griner’s punishment based on what would allow them to extract the most out of the U.S. in negotiations for a prisoner swap or some other concession.
“The longer her sentence, the more basic leverage Russia has,” said Weber, a distinguished fellow at Marine Corps University's Brute Krulak Center for Innovation and Future Warfare.
William Partlett, an associate professor at Melbourne Law School and an authority on Russian politics, told Yahoo Sports last week that the court didn’t need to send Griner to prison for 10 years for the Kremlin to negotiate a favorable trade. A five-year sentence, according to Partlett, allowed Russia to portray itself as “lenient” and “forgiving” to the rest of the world while still maintaining the upper hand in negotiations with the U.S.
“The political calculus, which the Kremlin knows, is that Biden cannot let her sit in a Russian prison for that long,” Partlett said.
The one thing unanimously agreed on by experts is that Griner’s punishment wasn’t the judge’s decision alone. Former State Department foreign services officer David Salvo said high-ranking Russian officials likely dictated Griner’s sentence based on objectives that Russia was seeking to achieve.
“Look, the Russians are good at this stuff unfortunately,” said Salvo, the deputy director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy and an expert on Russian foreign policy. “It's just a really unfortunate scenario for Brittney. You have a heavily politicized case with lots of attention all over American society and lots of pressure on the Biden Administration. The Russians are going to try to get every bit they can out of this.”
At the same time as Griner’s trial has unfolded inside a cramped courtroom outside Moscow, the question of her fate has also been discussed at the highest levels of U.S-Russian diplomacy. Last Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov to urge him to accept the U.S.’s “substantial proposal” to secure the release of Griner and Paul Whelan, another American whom the government considers wrongfully detained.
Blinken has declined to share details of the offer, but he has not denied reports that President Biden has signed off on trading a notorious Russian arms trafficker with high-level government and military intelligence connections. Viktor Bout is serving a 25-year sentence in an Illinois federal prison for conspiring to kill Americans and sell weapons to Colombian terrorists.
