In February, according to her own telling, WNBA star and Olympic gold medalist Brittney Griner did exactly what many of us have done at some point in our lives: realized she had an impending trip for which she hadn’t packed and threw together a bag, forgetting everything that was in there.
Thousands of Americans can relate to the frustrating experience of TSA pulling them aside to carefully extricate a pocket knife or small tube of lotion or something equally harmless as if it were a nuclear warhead. The difference for Griner was that it was less than a gram of cannabis oil in some overlooked vape cartridges, and, to her misfortune, the finders weren’t TSA but Russian customs officers, who promptly took her into custody for illegal drug possession and smuggling.
On Thursday, she pled guilty, an effectively forced plea in a country with a less than 1% acquittal rate in criminal courts. The sordid affair now moves into the diplomatic arena, where the Biden administration must use whatever leverage it has to bring Griner home. The straining of relations owing to madman Vladimir Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine surely makes this tougher, though Putin’s own weakening economic position could prove a useful pressure point.
