An American man who was in Russia was sentenced to 9 years of prison for drunken conduct, after he passed out after a night of drinking and the police were called to drive him to a hospital. The police claim that while in the police car he became belligerent during the ride and tugged on the driver's arm, making the car swerve and endangering the lives of the police officers. They also claim he elbowed one of the other officers in the car. The police have presented a jacket with a torn arm as evidence that he tugged on the driver. The man's Russian girlfriend claims that she and the driver of the car she was in were following right behind the police car and did not at any time see it swerve, as police claim. The man had been celebrating a night out with his friends and his girlfriend's co-workers. At some point on the ride home the man appeared very ill, his lips were blue, and it appeared he needed urgent medical help. The driver of the car, who was a co-worker of the woman, called the police, who put the man in the back of their car and then drove him to a police station. The man claims he has no recollection of the events from that night. Russian judge sentences former U.S. Marine Trevor Reed to 9 years in prison (nbcnews.com) Is this an excessive prison sentence for what was likely drunken misconduct? There could be the possibility this man's drink was spiked with something without his knowledge that caused his erratic behavior. The man's name is Trevor Reed, from Texas, and his girlfriend is Alina Tsybulnik.
I am thinking maybe the man did something else to the officers inside that car that angered them, and then they lied or exaggerated about him endangering their safety to get back at him and try to make sure he got a lot of punishment. Of course once a lie is told, the police cannot backtrack on the story, or it is an admission that they lied before. It's also possible the man might have taken some illegal drug at the party that ended up leading to his illness and belligerent behavior. I am thinking maybe the reason that girl's co-worker called the police was that the man was already acting belligerent and the driver did not want to have to deal with him. Apparently the man has gone on a hunger strike to protest his excessive prison sentence and his treatment in prison. Reed has been in solitary confinement for nearly three months now, and he has not been able to contact his family in nearly four months. He has been in Russian custody since August 2019, sentenced to nine years last July for assaulting two police officers. The U.S. embassy in Moscow has called the trial absurd, as the two officers struggled to recall the alleged incident in court hearings and contradicted themselves repeatedly. Former US Marine detained by Russia goes on hunger strike to protest treatment, article from November 8, 2021
Don't do stupid things in foreign countries, especially if you're an American....where'd he think he was, Portland Oregon? If he's waiting for THIS State Department, under THIS administration, to ride to the rescue he'd best learn to love the gulag!
It's interesting that you mention Portland Oregon... This was a response to my thread I received on another forum site: It sounds like the man was blacked out drunk and delirious. That happened to me once, at the Beijing airport right before I hopped on a flight to San Francisco, I grabbed a bottle of 130 proof baijiu at a gift shop, and drank almost all of it on the plane, after drinking before the flight. And drinking on the flight (before they cut me off, but then I just went back to the baijiu). I came to in an emergency room, strapped to a bed. I thought I was in the dungeons of the San Francisco airport, and the straps were kinda weird, part of the hand straps were leather, and I was vainly reaching with my teeth to try to unbind them. There were these three security guards that had been hanging around, and even giving me a little s(*)(*)(*) here and there, when I finally got released. It seemed like I was raving about how I have to get to Oregon (I didn't remember it, but was apparently in a rage or something when I came in), because one of the guys was saying like, "You gotta keep it cool right now, you want to get back to Oregon right?" He also asked me something like, "so are you gonna go tell all of them up in Oregon how we run you through like this down here?" (Or something to the effect, though he said it in an almost sad way, like he didn't want to be thought of in a bad light, and I said "yup".) He said one more thing though, something like, "You gotta take it easy. Yelling at cops?" I assure you, I have no memory whatsoever of yelling at any cops, I was fully blacked out, it was like they apparently carried me off the plain and ambulanced me to the hospital, and I don't remember anything between drinking the baijiu on the plain and coming to strapped to a hospital bed. This sounds like a like situation. The guy was blacked out, delirious, and well, you might say out of his mind. He was probably slamming hard liquor, and that s(*)(*)(*) happens like that. In my case, the only silver lining was, they had my carry on luggage there in the hospital, and I still had a few good sips of baijiu left in the bottle. - Crantag politicsforum.org/ , Law, Justice, Crime & Punishment section
""I think it would be unethical and immoral to plead guilty to a crime I didn't commit," he said in his closing statement on the eve of the trial's verdict. "If I am going to be given a prison sentence, I'd rather stay in prison than walk free tomorrow a liar and a coward."" often the American system is the same, show no remorse, and you get the max sentence innocent people get the harshest punishments often because of this
I would never go to a country like Russia, China or North Korea, many do though, and some live to regret it
Russia is not like a Western European country, but I still believe your comment expresses ignorance. If North Korea were like a 100 on a scale of how bad things are, with 100 being the worst, China would be a 35 or 40 and Russia would only be 20 or 25. (The US would be 7 or 10)
An update to the story. Trevor Reed has been freed after Russia and the US agreed to a prisoner exchange. Reed had been detained in Russia since 2019 and was released in April 2022. He had been detained in Russia for nearly three years. Reed's father described "horrible, dungeon-type of conditions" that his son had endured. "If you saw the video of him getting out of the FSB van today, you can see he's very thin. To us, he looked frail," Joey Reed said. His release comes after months of effort by the US government, officials said, and was particularly urgent given concerns about Reed's health. He was traded for Russian national Konstantin Yaroshenko, who had been sentenced in the US to 20 years in prison on cocaine smuggling charges. Yaroshenko is a Russian pilot who had been detained in Liberia by undercover US Drug Enforcement Agency agents on May 28, 2010, and brought to the US.
Honestly? If I look at the US judicial system and US law / US jurisprudence, the bottom line is that it is not really different in the USA! A few partly funny examples from US active jurisdiction ... ARIZONA: – Skirt is mandatory. In Tucson, women are not allowed to wear trousers. – Ownership of dildos is limited to two. - Pruning or chopping down a cactus is punishable by up to 25 years in prison. – It is illegal to refuse a person a glass of water. – If you are attacked by a criminal, you can only defend yourself with the same weapons that the attacker has. - Any crime committed with a red mask on the face is a capital crime. - In Hayden, teasing of sheep and bullfrogs is forbidden. - Reversing vehicles is prohibited in Glendale. - No one is allowed to ride their horse up the courthouse steps in Prescott. – In Nogales, men are not allowed to wear their suspenders “visibly”. CONNECTICUT: – Sunday belongs to God alone. Kissing women on the Lord's Day is strictly forbidden in Hartford. – In New Britain, even in the event of a fire, the speed limit for fire engines is 25 mph. UTAH: – The husband is responsible for all crimes committed by his wife if she is in his presence. – As soon as a person is 50 years old, he/she can marry his/her cousin/s. – The (private) possession of nuclear weapons is permitted – however, detonating the weapon is prohibited. – In Monroe, two dancers must always leave enough space between them so that daylight can be seen between them.
You're taking this discussion off topic. Personally, I happen to find a lot of those laws you listed not that unreasonable, even though they might appear unreasonable on the surface. But if you wanted to talk about that, you'll have to start a new thread discussion. With the Russian Konstantin Yaroshenko, it was all a giant undercover trap set up by the US, and the details of the entire crime were plotted out by US law enforcement. What many would call "entrapment". The man claims he never was involved in smuggling drugs before that incident.
Really "off topic"? I think no... Regarding the way your American police treat their own and foreign citizens, as well as your legal penal system and the amount of penalties imposed, I would say that you should be very quiet here before you expose this incident in Russia like you are doing now! I was able to personally experience the way you deal with something like this very closely. I was in Las Vegas with a buddy of mine at the time and we also drunk a little bit too much. Then later he was chatted up by a prostitute on the street and after 10 minutes "Blah Blah" and nothing else, the handcuffs suddenly clicked on him. He spent more than a day in pre-trial detention and was given 6 months probation, a $1,000 fine and had to leave the country at the earliest possible date, as well as a 5-year ban on any new visa. And all this for what? For nothing, absolutely nothing! Since then, the USA has been a "no go area" for him and also for me ... and many friends, relatives and acquaintances canceled every planned trip to the USA as a result, when they heared of it! And honestly, if it wasn't a US citizen here in Russia, you'd care a crap about it, eh?
It sounds like there was pressure from higher up to have him arrested. Possibly to take him as a political prisoner, and use what he had previously done as an excuse to hold him. Russia did end up trading him in a prisoner exchange. On the drive home, Reed became unmanageable, according to his girlfriend, Alina Tsybulnik, and jumped out of the car. Unable to get him back in and fearing for his safety, Tsybulnik and her friends said they called the police to ask them to take Reed to a drunk tank to sober up. Two police officers agreed and after taking Reed to the station told his girlfriend to come pick him up in the morning. Reed, who says the last thing he remembers was being in the park, said when he woke up in the lobby of the police station the next morning initially he was free to leave. But as he waited for his girlfriend to arrive to pick him up, a shift change occurred and the police brass on the next shift decided to hold him. Then, he said, agents from Russia’s powerful domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service or FSB, arrived and interrogated him. "I pretty much knew as soon as I saw FSB agents where this case was headed,” said Reed. "The main thing that they wanted to know was about my military service," Reed added. "They didn't ask me at all, not one question about if I had committed a crime, if I had done something wrong. They did not ask me anything related to that at all. They wanted to know about my military service primarily." After the agents' arrival, the police abruptly accused Reed of assaulting the police officers who had taken him the night before, charging him with endangering their lives. He was arrested on the spot. 'I fought': Trevor Reed speaks out on how he survived nearly 3 years in a Russian prison - ABC News (go.com), May 22, 2022, by Patrick Reevell, James Hill, Bill Hutchinson
That is the irony, isn't it? Alcoholism and drunkenness is extremely common in Russian society, even more than it is in the US. I read one article about rural Russian hospitals where male nurses showing up to the job inebriated on alcohol is so common that it is almost normalized. Due to the underfunding and low pay, there is a huge shortage of nurses so it is not so easy to just fire them, even for showing up to work half drunk. A few bathhouses and nightclub businesses in Tokyo actually have a sign on their door announcing that they have a policy of prohibiting Russian guests, because Russian tourists are known to get so rowdy and drunk.
I wouldn't go to any of them, and definitely not get drunk while there. Foreign countries are HOSTILE of late Really, International Travel if you're American nowadays is really no fun at all. Go on a Cruise Ship and don't leave it much if you just have to leave the US
Well, it sort of is the American government's fault for being so hostile to foreign citizens in other parts of the world. These days the US has been trying to enforce laws outside its own borders in many instances. You can understand why that might make some other countries very unhappy. The prisoner that Reed was traded for was a Russian citizen that the US had arrested in Liberia. That Russian citizen had never been to US. The whole plot appears to have been a setup, entrapment by American law enforcement. There is no evidence or indication the Russian citizen had been involved in drug smuggling before that. Russia is not happy about the US arresting its citizens in other parts of the world based on very questionable cases.
I know essentially nothing about this specific case but I did read an explanation from way back in 1943 that explains how we can open up a door to dark influences when we are drunk........ This is only one small aspect of a subject such as this...... https://near-death.com/george-ritchie-nde/ Our deciding to get drunk in a foreign nation is an astonishingly unwise decision to make!
If an American was arrested for acting out while drunk then 110 million Russians should be in prison in Siberia.
