Marc Fogel Still in Russia for Marijuana After Griner Freed

Marc Fogel, a 61-year-old American teacher arrested after entering Russia in August 2021 for possessing medical marijuana, has a case comparable to WNBA star Brittney Griner’s, but after Griner’s release this week, Fogel’s future remains uncertain.

Fogel was arrested at the Sheremetyevo Airport carrying less than 20 grams of cannabis that had been prescribed to him in Pennsylvania for medical purposes. He was sentenced to 14 years in a penal colony. In similar fashion, Griner was arrested in February in Russia when airport security found hashish cartridges in her luggage, containing less than a gram of hashish oil. However, nearly three months after Griner’s arrest, the U.S. State Department reclassified her as “wrongfully detained”—a status Fogel never received.

Griner was later sentenced to nine years, but this week Griner was released after 10 months in holding in a high-profile prisoner exchange. Fogel’s family is hoping for a similar outcome in his case.

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“The Fogel family is very happy for the Griner family and hopes that the U.S. government will apply the same kind of effort to get Marc out,” Thomas Firestone, the family’s attorney, tells TIME. “This is just an extremely unfair sentence and we hope that the U.S. government will do everything in its power to get Marc home safely.”

Fogel, hailing from Pennsylvania, has been a history teacher at various international schools throughout his career in Colombia, Venezuela, Oman and Malaysia. From 2012 until his arrest, Fogel had been working at the Anglo-American School in Moscow, an elite private school that teaches the children of American diplomats and those of other international political figures.

In June, a…