This is the first time I've ever seen anyone defining "being in prison" as "self-imposed exile".
Assange has been in an English prison for 4 years now. The only thing for which he was actually convicted (skipping bail during extradition proceedings) accounts for only 1 of those.
People who are awaiting trail or extradition are typically held during that process if they're considered a flight risk, which I think that's been shown to be a real risk since he was convicted for that.
My information is a few years out of date but I've been assured that at least he is only being extradited to Sweden for wild sex crimes and not the United States! Now let me check the Wikipedia arti... oh, turns out he is being extradited to the United States. A lot of people didn't see that coming (never really understood why not, but that is people for you).
The situation is in this awkward position where there was an obvious conspiracy to get Assange and making predictions on the assumption of a conspiracy has had great predictive power. The only change is it is isn't a conspiracy any more because everything is playing out publicly in British courts.
So while Assange is certainly being subjected to a lot of usual processes, the usual processes are being turned on him because he embarrassed the US government by bringing its activities to light. I have no doubt that is illegal. If I was a government, I too would want to criminalise people trying to hold me accountable. The issue is that punishing people for encouraging transparency is an inescapably political act.
And Assange is on the right side of history on this one. It is easy to see him as a footnote in every textbook one day as "and this was the moment when people started to find out what was going on".
In fact, people said at the time that it was ridiculous to believe that the Sweden case (where charges were never laid, and the whole case was dropped due to lack of evidence, picked up by another prosecutor, run with for several years with all sorts of procedural irregularities, and then dropped again for lack of evidence before the statute of limitations expired) might just be a ruse to make it easier to extradite him to the States.
Because people very strongly said this was only about accusations of sex crimes and the US would never lay charges for publishing - because that would mean what the New York Times does is illegal, we were told.
It's insane to see the level of malice directed at Passage and say anything being done to him is justified. I can only see the mottled opinion of him here as the effect of successful smearing.
This is the first time I've ever seen anyone defining "being in prison" as "self-imposed exile".
Assange has been in an English prison for 4 years now. The only thing for which he was actually convicted (skipping bail during extradition proceedings) accounts for only 1 of those.