No.

Assange didn't commit a crime, and was still forced by the Brits to confess in order to be released. Snowdens situation is completely different.

His only hope was a much wider view of the legality of the acts he'd taken to be considered, taking into account the legality and constitutionality of what he released information about, and there was and is no chance of that.

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slg 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>Assange didn't commit a crime

Assange literally pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act.

And if we're going to pretend that plea deals are coercion than we better rethink how the whole criminal justice system works.

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impossiblefork 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, that he was forced to do so by the Brits in order to be release is what I referred to, so of course it is coercion.

He is of not American and has no duty to be loyal to the US or to refrain from committing espionage against it.

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slg 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Your objection isn't to just Assange's case. It's with over 90% of criminal cases in the US. I was talking about a particular situation, so I'm not going to have the debate you seemingly want to have.

	▲	impossiblefork 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My objection is absolutely with Assange's case. I don't particularly approve of the idea of these sorts of plea deals, but they are not the core problem. The core problem is that Britain pressured Assange to enter into a US plea deal over something which it was entirely legal for him to do, seeing as he was in Iceland when the acts were committed. Seeing as part of the information obtained related to black sites at which there is reason to believe that people were killed (we know that that a person released from the Polish black site were almost killed, so we can be fairly sure that a bunch of people died there), and Iceland has a law making it legally mandatory to help people who are in danger; and I think there's good reason to believe that he had reason to believe that the information would reveal such things, so that it wasn't just him doing good, but him doing his legal duty, once he had reason to believe that people were in danger. So my concern has very little to do with plea agreements. They have to do with Britain.

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blitzar an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Assange didn't commit a crime

Smearing your own faeces on the wall isnt a crime - but breach of bail is

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masfuerte 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

He'd served his time for that.

	▲	blitzar 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		didn't commit a crime - or - committed a crime and served his time one is true and one is false

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youngtaff an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

We don’t know whether Assange committed a crime because he refused to go to Sweden to face the rape charges

He did of course commit several crimes under UK law by absconding to the Ecuadorian Embassy