Judging Freedom - Brittney Griner in Russian loses her court appeal

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Tuesday, October 25th, 2022, a month or two months from Christmas. It's about 2 40 in the afternoon here on the east coast of the United States. Earlier today, a ruling came down from an appellate court in Moscow affirming the conviction and affirming the sentence of Brittany Griner to nine years in a penal colony. This is not nine years of sitting in a jail cell. This is nine years of hard labor. We don't have penal colonies in the United States. In fact, most civilized countries throughout the world have abolished them, but they do exist in Russia, China, North Korea, and places like that. Ms. Greiner, who of course is an internationally

recognized basketball star and plays for the Phoenix Mercury, was returning from a trip to Russia when Russian customs officials went through her luggage at the airport in Moscow and discovered some medicinal marijuana. She was arrested, tried. At her trial, her physician from Phoenix, Arizona testified that he prescribed this for her. He prescribed it where it is perfectly lawful. It's obviously not lawful in Moscow. She shouldn't have had it with her, but she did. And for that, she was convicted and sentenced to nine years in the penal colony, and appellate court upheld the sentence yesterday. So they are about to move her to the penal colony. Now, appeals in foreign courts are not like they are in America. In American courts, if a defendant

is appealing a criminal conviction, it's just the judges and the government lawyers and the defendant's lawyers engaging usually in a high-end argument. I say high-end because a lot of it is theory about what mistakes the trial judge made. In Russia, the defendant can actually participate in this and can actually testify again, this time instead of before one judge and a jury, before three judges. Well, these three judges heard her testimony, asked her questions, heard her lawyer, asked the lawyer's questions, heard the government's lawyer, asked the government's lawyer questions, and then upheld the conviction and upheld the sentence. She has three more appeals. There are two more levels of appellate

appeal, panels of three judges, before she reaches the Supreme Court of Russia. Now, don't get your hopes up. This is not a court system as we have in the United States. In the United States, for the most part, the judiciary is independent of the executive. That is not the case in Russia. You want to become a judge in Russia, you toe the party line, and if you play your cards right and know the right people and lobby hard enough, you'll get that judicial position. And if you want to go up the food chain to a low level or

an intermediate level or a high level appellate court, you tow the party line even more. So her chances of acquittal or a reduction of the sentence are grim unless President Putin gets involved, President Biden gets involved, and the two of them engineer some kind of a prisoner swap. We all know what Putin wants. He wants the United States to stop doing what it shouldn't be doing, which is supplying material, military equipment to Ukraine, maybe even troops. I almost said troops because we think there are troops on the ground, but they're out of uniform. We think that the Pentagon, if you heard Colonel Douglas McGregor earlier today, is making plans for a massive American presence in Ukraine. Another topic for another time. But I am sure that President Biden's people can negotiate

something with President Putin's people. There's a Russian arms dealer named Viktor Bout, B-O-U-T, who had a lot of dealings in the United States. Some think he was a CIA asset and an FSB, that's the successor to the KGB, asset at the same time, which would really be a hoot. He's serving a very long sentence in an American prison for being an unlicensed, unregistered arms dealer. And President Putin would very much like Victor Bout back. Look, I want Brittany Griner home, not because she's a great basketball star, not because she's a role model for women, not because she's a role model for the LGBTQ community, but because she's a human being who shouldn't be in a Russian

prison colony on a trumped-up charge that normally is overlooked in Russia and that is not even a crime in most of the United States. Joe Biden, Mr. President, do what you have to do. Judge Napolitano for judging freedom.