Increasingly, some states, particularly those hostile to the U.S., use the detention of Americans as a way of forcing costly concessions-lifting sanctions, say, or swapping prisoners. citizens are arrested around the world every year, for alleged crimes that range from traffic violations and protesting autocratic governments to murder.
#Laugh now cry later tattoo trial#
The trial had a surreal quality, and not only because the outcome was more or less preordained. The endgame was not clearing her name but getting her home. Griner sat, most days, for weeks, in the cage, a few feet away from a wooden table crowded with lawyers and others, listening to the translator, her face a stone. The judge denied the request but allowed her to sit. Near the start of Griner’s trial, on July 1st, her lawyers asked the judge that she be allowed to testify standing outside of the cage, given her height. were the worst they had been since the beginning of the Cold War. A week after her arrest, Russia had invaded Ukraine, and relations between Russia and the U.S. But Griner was not a normal foreigner, and this was not a normal situation. A foreign citizen arrested in the possession of a tiny amount of drugs might usually be given no more than a month in jail, a fine, and deportation. Griner and her lawyers pleaded for leniency, but everyone knew better than to hope for it. government would be involved in negotiating her release. On May 3rd, the State Department declared her “wrongfully detained,” a designation which meant that the U.S. It was her lifeline to the outside world. players, her friends, and her family, including her wife, Cherelle. Through her lawyer, she received e-mails, monitored by Russian officials, from fellow W.N.B.A.
![laugh now cry later tattoo laugh now cry later tattoo](https://hative.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/smile-now-cry-later/7-smile-now-cry-later-on-leg.jpg)
During the rest of the day, according to a report in Russian state media, there were books (Dostoyevsky in translation, a book about Keith Richards), Russian television, and letters. After breakfast, the inmates would go for walks in the courtyard an old bust of Lenin looked on. Her bed was too short for her to stretch out on. Griner shared a cell with two other English-speaking women, in a prison that was once an orphanage. The maximum sentence for the charges was ten years. Her phone was seized, and she was taken to prison. She’d been forced to sign papers without knowing what was on them, she said. During her detainment at the airport, the translator had been withholding Griner had to resort to the Google translate app to understand what people were saying. She hadn’t meant to bring any drugs into Russia, and hadn’t realized what was happening to her as the nightmare unfolded. salaries overseas.) Doctors in Arizona had prescribed her cannabis to help her deal with pain after more than a decade of sustaining injuries. (Top players can make six to seven times their W.N.B.A. Ekaterinburg, the Russian team that Griner plays for during the W.N.B.A. Griner told the court she hadn’t known that the cartridges were there she’d packed in haste, while recovering from COVID, rushing to join the other members of U.M.M.C. Officials found vape cartridges with traces of hashish oil-seven tenths of a gram, roughly the weight of a small raisin-in her bag. It had been six months since Griner was pulled out of a security line at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport.
![laugh now cry later tattoo laugh now cry later tattoo](https://www.tattoo.com/wp-content/uploads/files/wendy%20tat.jpg)
But, in the courtroom, as she awaited the verdict in what one United States congressman had already called a “sham trial,” she looked drawn, and vulnerable. championship, four EuroLeague championships, and two Olympic gold medals, and has been named one of the twenty-five best players in W.N.B.A. (She threw down two dunks in her first game alone.) Since then, she’s won a W.N.B.A. draft-she was such a dominant and dynamic physical force that she single-handedly changed the perception of possibilities in women’s basketball. When she began playing in the W.N.B.A., for the Phoenix Mercury-she was the first pick in the 2013 W.N.B.A. Griner stands six feet nine inches tall, and her playing weight is more than two hundred pounds. Griner wore a gray T-shirt, gray shoes, charcoal joggers her dreadlocks were pulled back, and wire-rimmed glasses framed her large, weary eyes. She pursed her lips as she offered her long inked arms to the guard, who unlocked the handcuffs. By then, a month into her trial in Khimki, outside of Moscow, for charges of drug possession, she knew the drill. The cage was small, even for a cage, and Brittney Griner ducked her head as she entered it.