Shujun Wang worked for a pro-democracy organization while passing information about dissidents to China, prosecutors said. He was sentenced to three years of supervised release.
For decades, Shujun Wang presented himself as a champion for Chinese dissidents. A military scholar who fled China after the Tiananmen Square massacre, Mr. Wang settled in Queens, where he helped found a group that promoted democracy and criticized Beijing’s authoritarianism.
Federal prosecutors said his activism was a charade, choreographed to collect and transmit information about critics of the Chinese Communist Party, and they charged him in 2022 with spying on behalf of the Chinese government. He was convicted after a swift trial and faced the possibility of years in prison.
But on Monday, a judge in Brooklyn federal court declined to put him behind bars, instead sentencing Mr. Wang to three years of supervised release.
In issuing the sentence, the judge, Denny Chin, said that though Mr. Wang had committed “serious” crimes by sharing information with Chinese officials, there was no evidence that anyone had been physically harmed as a result of his actions. He noted that Mr. Wang, 76, suffered from a variety of ailments, and that a doctor had said his behavior was “consistent with senile dementia.”
Before the sentence was announced, Mr. Wang, speaking through a Mandarin interpreter, gave a rambling statement in which he accepted responsibility for his actions, before noting his work as a scholar of the Pacific theater in World War II and his love for democracy.
“Ever since I was young, I dreamed of a democratic United States,” Mr. Wang said. After the proceeding, he walked out of the courtroom with the aid of a cane, supported by one of his lawyers.
