WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange walked free from a court after pleading guilty to violating US espionage law in a deal that allowed him to head straight home to Australia.
Assange released from the US Pacific island territory of Saipan ending a 14-year legal saga in which he spent over five years in a British high-security jail and seven years in asylum at the Ecuadorean embassy in London battling extradition to the US, where he faced 18 criminal charges.
Assange, during the three-hour hearing, pleaded guilty to one criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national defence documents. However, he said he had believed the US Constitution’s First Amendment that protects free speech, shielded his activities.
The WikiLeaks founder said that working as a journalist he encouraged his source to provide information that was said to be classified in order to publish that information. “I believed the First Amendment protected that activity but I accept that it was … a violation of the espionage statute.”
The Chief US District Judge, Ramona V Manglona, admitted his guilty plea and released him due to time already served in a British jail.
Speaking to the media outside the court, his US lawyer, Barry Pollack said: “We firmly believe that Mr Assange never should have been charged under the Espionage Act and engaged in (an) exercise that journalists engage in every day.”
He said that the WikiLeaks’ work would continue.
