Planes land on U.S. territory every day, but one particular flight touching down has been hotly anticipated for months and brings with it great news and precious cargo: WNBA star Brittney Griner, who was arrested at the Moscow airport in February on a trumped-up charge of bringing illegal drugs into the country and how now been released in a prisoner swap.
Let’s be clear about something: Griner was effectively a political prisoner. Her crime — inadvertently packing a couple of cannabis-oil cartridges, which she had a medical prescription for, into her luggage when traveling to Russia — should have warranted a warning, maybe a small fine. In no rational system did it warrant a nine-year term in a penal colony, an eye-popping sentence even in a country as used to carceral punishment as ours.
The same can’t be said for the other side of the swap, convicted arms trafficker Viktor Bout, a man whose illicit businesses scattered weapons across volatile conflicts in multiple continents, and who likely still has the contacts and the resources to do damage. It’s a good thing that Griner was released, but an indisputably bad one that Bout did too, and the U.S. certainly got a raw deal.
