Chief Judge Ramona Manglona sentenced a somber Assange to the 62 months he already served in a London prison while he fought his extradition to the U.S., and allowed him to return to his native Australia without spending any time in a U.S. prison. …

The three-hour court hearing marked the end of a bitter and protracted legal fight over his fate. Assange pleaded guilty to conspiring to obtain and disseminate classified information for WikiLeaks, which in 2010 published thousands of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables about America’s actions in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s.

“Working as a journalist, I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified,” Assange said in court. “The First Amendment was in contradiction with the Espionage Act.” …

Assange had spent years holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy and in prison in London, trying to avoid being sent to the U.S. to face trial. Prosecutors settled on the U.S. territory of Saipan to meet Assange’s demand that he avoid setting foot in the continental United States, while still requiring him to plead guilty to a felony. …

Observers in both Saipan and the U.S. weighed in Tuesday on the unusual accord, and the reaction across the political spectrum showed Assange remains a polarizing figure even as his case comes to a close. Some press advocates worried that Assange was essentially pleading to a crime for actions that could be viewed as similar to those of national security journalists—working to obtain government secrets and publishing them. …

Former Vice President Mike Pence, whose administration brought the case against Assange, said the plea deal didn’t go far enough to punish the man who “endangered the lives of our troops in a time of war and should have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent presidential candidate whose bid for the White House has drawn support from some Democrats and Republicans, applauded Assange as a “generational hero.”

“I am overjoyed,” Kennedy said on X, suggesting a monument be built to Assange as a “civics lesson for the American public about the importance of free speech.”

What do you think of Julian Assange? Is he a hero of free speech, or did he put our troops at risk? Share your thoughts and prayers below.

(Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal. David G Silvers. Cancillería del Ecuador – https://www.flickr.com/photos/dgcomsoc/14933990406/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34813740)