OREANDA-NEWS  The Moscow City Court upheld the sentence of Robert Woodland, a citizen of the United States and the Russian Federation, who was sentenced to 12.5 years in a high-security penal colony in a criminal case of drug trafficking.

"The verdict of the Ostankino District Court of July 4, 2024 against Woodland was left unchanged, the appeal of the defense filed against the verdict was not satisfied," the Moscow City Court told Interfax on Tuesday.

Woodland's defense asked the court of appeal to commute the sentence imposed on him or send the case for a new trial to the first instance.

The state prosecution insisted on toughening the sentence to 12 years and 8 months in prison.

According to the verdict, Woodland was sentenced to 12 years and 6 months in a high-security colony for attempted drug trafficking on a large scale (Part 3 of Article 30 - paragraph "d" of Part 4 of Article 228.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).

Woodland's defense in the court of appeal stated that he partially pleaded guilty to the charges.

As previously reported in the Moscow prosecutor's office, it was established that Woodland, "acting as part of an organized group on January 3, 2024, following the instructions of the organizer, while in the forest park area of the city of Mytishchi, Moscow region, took a large batch of narcotic drug - mephedrone (4-methylmethcathinone) with a total weight of at least 46.91 g in a cache-bookmark." The American transported the drug to an apartment on Shirokaya Street in Moscow, where he packaged it in 49 parcels for further illegal sale.

When he tried to put drugs in a cache, he was detained.

Woodland, a 32-year-old citizen of the Russian Federation and the United States, was placed under arrest in Moscow in January 2024.

Woodland is a native of the Perm region and is actually registered there, but lived in the Moscow region. In 2020, he told Komsomolskaya Pravda in an interview that in 1993 he was adopted by a family from the United States, and in 2020 he returned to Russia.