An American judge accepted Julian Assange’s guilty plea on Wednesday, stating during the hearing that by pleading guilty to a violation of US espionage laws, the Wikileaks founder would now be a free man. Assange made a deal with the US government to avoid going to the mainland of the United States, resulting in his freedom being sealed in the Mariana Islands, an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean.
In court, Assange admitted that he had encouraged his source, US soldier Chelsea Manning, to deliver classified material, believing that the First Amendment of the US Constitution protected him. Judge Ramona V. Manglona told him that he could leave the courtroom as a free man following the ruling. Just after 4:30 am, Assange left the court without making a statement.
The Wikileaks founder was then taken on a plane from Saipan to Canberra, scheduled to arrive in his home country by 11:30 am. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese expressed happiness that Assange was returning home to reunite with his family, emphasizing that there was no point in detaining him. Under the deal, Assange was sentenced to 62 months in prison for espionage law violations, but he would no longer have to serve the sentence.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese expressed relief that the long legal battle was over. Assange had been incarcerated since April 2019 in a British prison after spending seven years at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. In the United States, Assange faced a total of eighteen charges and risked up to 175 years in prison for publishing secret documents about American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US government claimed that his actions endangered the lives of American informants.