The Education of Brittney Griner

On August 4, 2022, Brittney Griner, WNBA basketball star and two-time Olympic gold medalist, was sentenced in Russia to nine years in prison for illegally entering the country with cannabis oil in vape cartridges. It was entirely her own fault.

Detained in Russia since February, on the second day of her trial Griner pleaded guilty. She claimed she’d made an innocent mistake, that she’d hurriedly packed for her trip and didn’t realize the suspect cartridges went into her luggage. Because of this, she had “no intent” to break the law, she said. But Griner’s claim is complicated by several untidy facts. First, she had a medical prescription for cannabis. For obvious reasons, most people do not travel abroad without their prescriptions. Second, Griner had not one but two suspect cartridges in her luggage. Not noticing one is plausible but failing to spot two is unlikely. Third, while it’s not entirely clear, airport video footage seems to show the cartridges were in Griner’s carry-on bag, not in any checked bag that got spirited away first thing at her outbound airport back in the U.S., making it even less likely Griner was unaware she was traveling with cannabis during her half-way-around-the-world trip. But even if Griner did make an innocent mistake, and that she was telling the truth in court, she still nevertheless broke Russian law.

Well before the verdict, the U.S. State Department designated Griner “wrongfully detained.” That designation meant the Biden administration judged Griner’s jailing as a Russian ploy to extract some type of political concession or gain some form of leverage over U.S. foreign policy. But in Griner’s case, that designation appears to have been prematurely made, and arguably might still be unwarranted even after Griner’s sentencing.

Other Americans, arrested in Russia for similar crimes, were never designated “wrongfully detained.” Why Griner? 

Leaving aside for the moment any notion of political interference, as a foreign national traveling to Russia while in commission of a crime, even if that crime be slight, Griner had no reason to expect she’d be treated any differently than other foreign national similarly accused. And as it turns out, as Griner’s case has unfolded, reports of other Americans past and present detained in Russia under similar circumstances have now emerged. From these reports, Griner’s pre-trial detention and nine-year sentence appear not all that unique or exceptional.

In 2019, Naama Issachar, a late-20’s Israeli American, received a 7.5-year prison sentence for virtually the same crime as Griner’s. But Issachar’s offense was notably less, since, unlike Griner, Issachar wasn’t planning to stay in Russia at all but was merely transiting the country via a three-hour layover. (Issachar was pardoned after 10 months.) Also, this past June, just before Griner’s trial began, Marc Fogel, an American working as a schoolteacher in Russia, received a 14-year sentence for also carrying cannabis in his luggage, though a substantially greater quantity than either Griner or Issachar. All three, it turns out, were caught in the same Moscow airport. But of the three, only Griner was deemed wrongfully detained. Which calls into question the State Department’s decision. Because, even if Griner had made an inadvertent mistake (though still a crime), having since admitted to such, how could it be then that Russia was detaining her wrongfully? And why was it that both Fogel and Issachar, who had also experienced similar pre-trial detentions and received lengthy sentences, weren’t deemed wrongfully detained?

Meanwhile, the Russian legal system has valid reasons for imposing harsh sentences on foreign national lawbreakers: to send a strong message to other potential lawbreakers; and, because claims of making an innocent mistake prove guilt but are themselves claims difficult to prove. Griner can’t prove that she made a simple mistake; that’s merely an assertion without evidence. So, if the particulars of Griner’s case as listed above are accurate, then it would appear Griner had not made a simple mistake after all. Instead, it was more likely that she was well aware of having the suspect cartridges in her bags, meaning she was compounding her offense by making a disingenuous claim in court. If the judge came to believe exactly that, which seems entirely reasonable, then it would have been also reasonable for the judge to impose a near-maximum sentence, just as she did.

Griner had however made another mistake, one that went far beyond her crime and the verdict: she should never have gone to Russia in the first place. As an American basketball player in Russia, Griner would always be an American first, a basketball player second. And as an American, one must be naïve to think oneself immune from the simmering politics of our two nations, now almost diametrically opposed to one another. For Americans, just being in Russia now carries with it dual consequences, moral and physical.

Griner’s supporters in the U.S. have consistently claimed that she all but “had to go to Russia” to earn money during the WNBA offseason, as Nadine Domond, a former basketball player and Griner advocate, stated a week after Griner’s trial began (NPR, All Things Considered, July 7, 2022). Citing the significant pay gap between WNBA players and their male NBA counterparts, virtually every Griner supporter has tried to color Griner as an unfortunate victim of circumstance, both criminally and socioeconomically. In a humanitarian sense this is admirable, since Griner’s friends and supporters are hoping to boost public sentiment, and thereby build public pressure, on the Biden administration to cut a deal for her release. But it can also be carried to a ridiculous extreme. In a rather unfortunate New York Times op-ed by Roxane Gay (“Brittney Griner is Trapped and Alone. Where’s Your Outrage?” July 15, 2022), Ms. Gay doesn’t decry at all the fact that Griner broke Russian law. For Ms. Gay, that seems almost irrelevant, aside from Griner’s detention. Rather, fearing the likelihood that Griner might receive a near-maximum sentence, as “BG” later would, Gay is more upset that us Americans aren’t showing enough “outrage” on the matter. But outrage isn’t warranted. If Griner had received a sentence above the legal limit, then outrage would be due. But as spelled out already, Griner’s nine-year sentence is not only ordinary but seemingly reasonable under Russian law, no matter how us Americans might feel about it. The truth of the matter is, when it comes to Ms. Gay’s desire for outrage, the outrage she herself feels is that Brittney Griner is not receiving preferential treatment. But for what reason should Griner receive preferential treatment? Because she’s black? Because she’s gay? Because she’s an Olympic medalist? Because she doesn’t earn as much as LeBron James? Because it’s somehow America’s fault?

As suggested, there is a moral component to Griner stepping onto Russia soil. Arriving a week before the invasion of Ukraine, Griner however still cannot claim she was outside the moral sphere—because Putin as Russia’s nefarious autocrat has been inimical to western nations for well over a decade. In 2014, Putin annexed Crimea. In 2016, Putin struck at the very heart of democracy by interfering in our U.S. presidential election. And long before these years, and just as well afterwards, Putin has waged a global assassination campaign against his political foes and perceived enemies. Since at least the 2006 fatal polonium-210 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian defector living in England, others have been targeted as well: Sergei and Yulia Skripal, also in England, stricken in 2018 by the Russian nerve agent Novichok; Alexei Navalny, in 2020 also stricken by Novichok, who later returned to Russia to find himself imprisoned on trumped-up charges. Plus, the mysterious deaths of other Putin critics, most notably Boris Nemtsov, in 2015, shot dead outside the Kremlin. Considering the increasingly dark landscape of Putin’s Russia, any American who now travels there for non-political purposes can no longer reasonably claim they bear no moral obligations. This would be like saying it’s of no or little import that Putin meddles in our elections and goes about killing his opponents so long as there’s Russian rubles to be made. And precisely on that score many western corporations have since learned the hard way, seeing their businesses and assets in Russia appropriated by the state in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. But isn’t this precisely what Brittney Griner thought? That in the grand scheme of things, nothing that Putin has done through the years stood in the way of her earning money playing basketball. Otherwise, if that hadn’t crossed her mind, then Griner would just be spectacularly naïve.

So why not let her learn the hard way too?

Update: With the misguided December 2022 prisoner swap of Griner, a mere basketball player, for convicted Russian arms dealer Victor Bout, Paul Whelan—almost certainly an American spy sent to Russia under non-official cover—still remains in Russian detention.