President Obama Commutes Chelsea Manning’s Sentence, Will be Freed in May

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President Obama commutes Chelsea Manning’s sentence, will be freed in May

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama commuted most of the remaining prison sentence Chelsea Manning faces, announcing she will be freed from prison in May.

Manning was an army intelligence analyst that was convicted of an enormous 2010 leak that revealed American military and diplomatic activities across the world including revealing U.S. torture.

According to the New York Times:

“The decision by Mr. Obama rescued Ms. Manning, who twice tried to commit suicide last year, from an uncertain future as a transgender woman incarcerated at the male military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. She has been jailed for nearly seven years, and her 35-year sentence was by far the longest punishment ever imposed in the United States for a leak conviction.

Now, under the terms of Mr. Obama’s commutation announced by the White House on Tuesday, Ms. Manning is set to be freed on May 17 of this year, rather than in 2045.”

Manning was arrested in 2010 after leaking 700,000 military files and diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. Her prison sentence was in excess of the sentence that others had recently received for similar convictions of releasing classified material.

In fact, Manning has twice attempted to commit suicide while incarcerated and also went on a hunger strike in an effort to get the Army to allow her to undertake gender reassignment surgery.