![]() ![]() players, her friends, and her family, including her wife, Cherelle. It was her lifeline to the outside world. On May 3rd, the State Department declared her “wrongfully detained,” a designation which meant that the U.S. government would be involved in negotiating her release. Griner and her lawyers pleaded for leniency, but everyone knew better than to hope for it. 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. But Griner was not a normal foreigner, and this was not a normal situation. A week after her arrest, Russia had invaded Ukraine, and relations between Russia and the U.S. were the worst they had been since the beginning of the Cold War. 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. The judge denied the request but allowed her to sit. 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 endgame was not clearing her name but getting her home. The trial had a surreal quality, and not only because the outcome was more or less preordained. citizens are arrested around the world every year, for alleged crimes that range from traffic violations and protesting autocratic governments to murder. 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. ![]()
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