A key committee in the United States Senate has given approval to a resolution calling for the immediate release of several Americans imprisoned in Russia.
Marc Fogel, an American citizen jailed in Russia for 14 years for possessing 17 grams of medical marijuana.
One of those individuals was Marc Fogel, a teacher from Pennsylvania who was sentenced to 14 years in prison for possessing a little over half an ounce of marijuana that was prescribed by his doctor.
Today the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to pass Senate Resolution 629 to the full Senate.
“Marc Fogel has undergone three back surgeries, a spinal fusion, a hip replacement, and two knee surgeries to correct various injuries and health issues, which have left him with chronic back pain and a permanent limp”, states the resolution. “[He] did not wish to use opioids to manage his pain and was instead prescribed medical marijuana for pain management in a manner consistent with the State law of Pennsylvania.”
The resolution states that Russia “has presented no evidence to the contrary” that Fogel planned to use the marijuana for personal medical use.
“Marc Fogel’s sentence is vastly disproportionate to the severity of his nonviolent crime, wildly dissimilar to the typical punishments for comparable offenses in Russia, and clearly motivated by ongoing political tensions between Russia and the United States,” states the resolution.
When the bill was introduced, Senator John Fetterman, who is from the same state as Fogel, said:
I’m proud to stand with my colleagues today and again call for the immediate release of all Americans arbitrarily detained in Russia, including Marc Fogel, a Pennsylvanian”, said Senator Fetterman when the bill was introduced. “Marc is a history teacher who dedicated the last 35 years of his life to teaching young people. When he returned for his tenth and final year teaching in Russia, Marc was detained for carrying a small amount of medical marijuana, which was prescribed by his doctor.
But Marc has now spent over a year of a fourteen-year sentence in a Russian prison because of a bogus ‘large-scale drug trafficking’ conviction. A fourteen-year sentence is absurd – even by Russian standards. The bottom line is that Marc’s punishment simply does not match the crime. We must bring Marc, and all other unjustly detained Americans, home.
