WNBA star and two-time Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner is escorted from a court docket room ater a listening to, in Khimki simply exterior Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022.
Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
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Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
WNBA star and two-time Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner is escorted from a court docket room ater a listening to, in Khimki simply exterior Moscow, Russia, Thursday, Aug. 4, 2022.
Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
MOSCOW — Attorneys for American basketball star Brittney Griner on Monday filed an enchantment towards her nine-year Russian jail sentence for drug possession, Russian information companies reported Monday.
Griner, a middle for the Phoenix Mercury and a two-time Olympic gold medalist, was convicted on Aug. 4. She was arrested in February at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport after vape canisters containing hashish oil had been present in her baggage.
Griner performed for a girls’s basketball workforce in Yekaterinburg throughout the WNBA offseason.
Lawyer Maria Blagovolina was quoted by Russian information companies on Monday as saying the enchantment was filed, however the grounds of the enchantment weren’t instantly clear.
Blagovolina and co-counsel Alexander Boykov mentioned after the conviction that the sentence was extreme and that in comparable instances defendants have acquired a mean sentence of about 5 years, with a few third of them granted parole.
Griner admitted that she had the canisters in her baggage, however mentioned she had inadvertently packed them in haste and that she had no felony intent. Her protection workforce introduced written statements that she had been prescribed hashish to deal with ache.
Earlier than her conviction, the U.S. State Division declared Griner to be “wrongfully detained.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken took the bizarre step of unveiling publicly in July that the U.S. had made a “substantial proposal” to get Griner dwelling dwelling, together with Paul Whelan, an American serving a 16-year sentence in Russia for espionage.
Blinken did not elaborate, however NPR, The Related Press and different information organizations have reported that Washington has supplied to free Viktor Bout, a Russian arms vendor who’s serving a 25-year sentence within the U.S. and as soon as earned the nickname the “Service provider of Demise.”
On Sunday, a senior Russian diplomat mentioned alternate talks have been performed.
“This fairly delicate difficulty of the swap of convicted Russian and U.S. residents is being mentioned by means of the channels outlined by our presidents,” Alexander Darchiev, head of the International Ministry’s North America division, instructed state information company Tass. “These people are, certainly, being mentioned. The Russian facet has lengthy been searching for the discharge of Viktor Bout. The main points must be left to professionals, continuing from the ‘don’t hurt’ precept.'”
