A court near Moscow on Tuesday will hear an appeal by Brittney Griner, the American basketball star who was sentenced to nine years in prison for trying to smuggle a small amount of hashish oil into Russia.
A ruling is expected soon after the hearing, said Maria Blagovolina and Aleksandr Boikov, lawyers for Ms. Griner, who is jailed in Russia. The court can either leave the verdict as it is, reduce the jail term, or overrule it and send it back to the lower court, they said.
If the appeals court does not overrule the verdict, it will come into force and Ms. Griner will be sent to a penal colony.
On the eve of the hearing, Ms. Griner’s lawyers said in a statement that she did not expect “any miracles to happen.”
The fate of Ms. Griner — who was arrested on drug charges in a Moscow airport days before Russia invaded Ukraine — has been intertwined with a confrontational tug of war between Moscow and Washington.
Ms. Griner — who has been “very nervous” ahead of the hearing, according to her lawyers — will not appear in court and will participate in the proceedings via a video link from the detention center she has been held in since her arrest in February.
“Brittney is a very strong person and has a champion’s character,” the lawyers said in their statement. “She of course has her highs and lows as she is severely stressed being separated from her loved ones for over eight months.”
Ms. Griner was arrested on Feb. 17 in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, where she had arrived from the United States. She was en route to Yekaterinburg, a Russian city near the Ural Mountains, where she played for a women’s basketball team. Customs officials in Moscow said they had found two vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage and detained her.
Ms. Griner admitted her guilt in court but insisted that she had no intention to break the law, saying that the small amount of hashish oil appeared in her luggage because of negligence. She told the court that she had made “an honest mistake.”
Since she was sentenced in August, her lawyers have argued that the nine-year prison term — near the 10-year maximum for such a conviction — was too harsh for a first-time offense and was politically motivated.
American officials have accused Russia of using Ms. Griner and other Americans in Russian custody as bargaining chips. In July, the Biden administration offered a prisoner swap involving Ms. Griner, but Russian officials said it was premature to discuss a deal while her case was underway.
President Biden has said that there had been no movement with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, over Ms. Griner’s case. He also told CNN that he would only talk to Mr. Putin at a Group of 20 meeting to be held in Bali, Indonesia, next month if it was to discuss her situation.
Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico governor and ambassador to the United Nations who has been unofficially negotiating with Russian officials as a private citizen, said in October that he was “cautiously optimistic” that Ms. Griner can be exchanged together with Paul Whelan, who has been serving a prison term in Russian prison, before the end of the year.
Ms. Griner’s lawyers said that she was allowed to walk outside once a day in a small courtyard at her detention center. She spends the rest of her time in a small cell with two cellmates, sitting and sleeping on a specially elongated bed to accommodate her 6-foot-9 frame.