Chelsea Manning asks U.S. president to reduce sentence
Chelsea Manning, a transgender soldier serving 35 years at a Kansas military prison for leaking classified information to WikiLeaks, is asking President Barack Obama to commute her sentence to the 6 1/2 years she has already served.
In a commutation application released by her attorneys, Chelsea Manning said there was no historical precedent for such an extreme sentence for the leak of secret documents.
Manning was arrested in 2010 and convicted in 2013 in military court of six Espionage Act violations and 14 other offences for leaking more than 700,000 secret military and State Department documents, plus some battlefield video to WikiLeaks. At that point, she was known as Bradley Manning.
She is in custody at the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
Read more at thestar.com
Photo By Alicia Neal (Chelsea Manning Support Network) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons