Reporter sentenced to 16 years in Russian prison

[LennG]

https://share.newsbreak.com/7st0pho0

What could be the biggest travesty ever, Russia has sentenced a Wall Street reporter to 26 years in their prison system.

We all know how things work these days.
Maybe if he played basketball he would get out sooner.

[DaveBrown74]

It's awful, and I'm extremely sympathetic towards him and his family. Really terrible.

There is no defending this, but he did make the decision to put himself in a very risky situation. It was awful when that kid got put in a North Korean prison and was clearly tortured there and ended up dead, all for stealing or defacing some sign in a hotel there.

America may not be perfect, but at least you have some basic rights here. That is definitely not the case in these kinds of countries. People who go to places like Iraq, Russia, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, etc and engage in behavior that might get them in trouble are making a conscious decision to accept risks that could have awful consequences.

[DaveBrown74]

It's awful, and I'm extremely sympathetic towards him and his family. Really terrible.

There is no defending this, but he did make the decision to put himself in a very risky situation. It was awful when that kid got put in a North Korean prison and was clearly tortured there and ended up dead, all for stealing or defacing some sign in a hotel there.

America may not be perfect, but at least you have some basic rights here. That is definitely not the case in these kinds of countries. People who go to places like Iraq, Russia, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, etc and engage in behavior that might get them in trouble are making a conscious decision to accept risks that could have awful consequences.

I re-read my post here, and I again want to emphasize how terribly I feel about this situation. I'm not sure that was fully clear in my post. This guy is very brave, and having brave journalists who do what they believe is the right thing and report on things worth reporting on, even in the face of significant risks, feels like a dying thing in our country. I don't want to gloss over that point, and I feel like I did gloss over it in the above post. I want to be clear that I have a great deal of respect for this man.

The point of my other comments was merely to highlight how dangerous some of these kinds of countries are. As I indicated above, that is not to say America is fully safe, perfect, and doesn't have major problems of its own, but it's clearly not Russia, Iran, or North Korea either. If one engages in risky behavior in those kinds of places, even for the most righteous of reasons, the risks of that are simply quite different than they are here.

Gershkovich is clearly a very intelligent young man, so there is no doubt he knew these risks and was willing to accept them. Obviously that does not mean anyone sitting in the comforts of home back in the States should feel unsympathetic, and I hope the above did not sound that way because that is certainly not how I feel.

[MightyGiants]

We all know how things work these days.
Maybe if he played basketball he would get out sooner.

What exactly do you mean by this comment?

[LennG]

You aren't going to bait me into one of your political agendas.
If you can't figure out what I was referring to, so be it