Chelsea Manning’s 35-year sentence commuted by Obama
Chelsea Manning, serving a 35-year term for leaking a cache of classified military documents to WikiLeaks, had her sentence commuted Tuesday by President Barack Obama. The president, with just days remaining in his presidency, said Manning can be freed on May 17 of this year instead of 2045.
The 29-year-old Army private was court-martialed in 2013 for forwarding a cache of classified documents to WikiLeaks. After being convicted of leaking more than 700,000 documents and video, Manning—then known as Bradley—announced that she is a transgender woman and would be going by the name Chelsea.
Manning has been both reviled and lauded for her 2010 document dump and has been in prison longer than any other convicted US leaker. In a military first, Manning was approved in 2015 for hormone therapy as part of transition-related care, nearly a year after she made demands for such treatment. Along the way, Manning has had several run-ins with the authorities at the military brig at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. She has tried to commit suicide twice and even took on a hunger strike in a bid to win reassignment surgery.
