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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

It's becoming increasingly pointless for the US and UK to litigate this as the time Assange spends in formal custody accrues, mooting any likely potential sentence he'd receive in the US. The WSJ has Assange close to a plea deal that would avoid US custody altogether.

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Certainly the difference between a normal UK jail and indefinite solitary confinement with possibility for "enhanced interrogation" in the US is not pointless.

We still have the 8th and 14th Amendments. He's not going to get tortured.

And what did those Amendments do in Guantanamo Bay and CIA blacksites?

Guantanamo bay and the black sites are a disgraceful legacy of US foreign policy but aren’t germane to this discussion.

Assange faces bog standard criminal charges in the US that have proceeded through our standard courts. The extradition is being overseen by 2 separate court systems in 2 separate nations.

The whole point of Guantanamo is that it's not in the USA and therefore the US constitution doesn't apply and they can do what they want.

Which is ridiculous given that Assange was also not in the USA. Somehow US law applies to him when he has nothing to do with the USA, but not to people imprisoned on a US government facility by the US government.

The crimes the US charged occurred in the United States, and the DOJ alleges Assange's role was central to them. It's the same idea as charging the head of an organized crime family overseas with the racketeering offenses the family committed in New Jersey.

If the DOJ cannot prove that Assange's role was fundamental to enabling the offenses, and Assange can prove instead that he merely published information that could have become available to anyone, the case as I understand it fails.

Go read any first hand account of anyone who's spent time in solitary for more than a week and tell me that isn't torture. People go into solitary for years

The important point here is that it’s a tactic by Assange. He could at any time move this process forward.

Funny enough it’s likely a tactic that works! He’s likely to end up not doing any US time!

This isn't responsive to the comment I wrote.

Doesn't help if the US sentences him to death.

True. Or, they might shoot him out of a cannon. Or even nuke him.

The guy is in talks right now with the DOJ for a misdemeanor plea, a mercy termination of a prosecution in which the accused appears to have voluntarily served out the sentence pre-trial. If the extradition had gone perfectly smoothly, the C.W. seems to be that he would have been facing single-digit years. Assange is not in fact all that important.

The USA is being asked for assurances that they won't charge him with anything that carries a death sentence. They're not being asked for assurances about nukes or cannons. So the UK judiciary are taking the threat of a death sentence seriously.

These assurance requests are routine and often legally required in countries with no or highly constrained death penalty. They happen in -> US extradition cases all the time.

I checked, and they still haven't issued this assurance. So no, this isn't just a boilerplate thing.

You think he'll spend 175 years in UK prison?

No.

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