Shortly before 3 p.m. on Wednesday afternoon, a cadre of Russian police officers escorted Brittney Griner into a cramped courtroom outside Moscow and led her to her customary spot inside a metal defendant’s cage.
Griner, clad in a long-sleeved black Phoenix Mercury T-shirt, held out her hands so that one of her guards could remove her shackles. Then, as cameras flashed, the WNBA star shook hands with her attorneys through the bars of the cage, flashed a thumbs-up sign and held up a sheet of paper with personal photos of her wife Cherelle and other supporters back home.