Just three days before leaving office, Barak Obama has made a huge move as one of his final acts as president. He commuted Chelsea Manning’s prison sentence and ordered for her to be freed almost 29 years early.
In legal speak, a commute is basically the reduction of an existing sentence to a less severe one. Obama ordered for Manning’s 35-year sentence to be cut to just over seven years, reports the New York Times, which means Manning is set to go free on 17 May 2017.
To bring you up to speed, back in 2010 Manning was convicted for leaking more than 700,000 classified American intelligence documents, videos and battlefield accounts to WikiLeaks. It’s actually considered the biggest breach of classified material in US history, for which Manning received the longest punishment that was ever enforced for leaked information in the United States.
Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, was an intelligence analyst in Iraq. Shortly after she was sentenced in 2013, she gave a statement announcing her gender transition. She said: ‘I am Chelsea Manning. I am a female’.
She continued: ‘Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible’. It wasn’t until 2015 that Manning was approved for hormone therapy after a suing the Army for withholding her treatment (no member of the armed forces had ever been approved for this sort of therapy at the time).
So far Manning has been held at a male military prison in Leavenworth, Kansas and wasn't due to be released until 2045. Last year however, Manning attempted suicide, which the US military punished with a spell of solitary confinement.
In a statement Chase Strangio, an attorney for the American Civil Lierties Union representing Manning, said: 'This move could quite literally save Chelsea’s life, and we are all better off knowing that Chelsea Manning will walk out of prison a free woman, dedicated to making the world a better place and fighting for justice for so many'.
Albeit momentous, Obama’s decision to release Manning from her sentence is considered by some to pretty controversial due to the scale and nature of the intel Manning leaked. Also tied into all of this is the fact that only last week, WikiLeak’s Julian Assange had said he would surrender himself to the authorities if Manning was pardoned. So it's no doubt that more will materialise in the time between now and Manning's release.
She's one of 273 people to be commuted and pardoned in Obama's last few days as president, which it itself is pretty significant. The White House issued a statement that said: ‘These 273 individuals learned that our nation is a forgiving natation where hard work and a commitment to rehabilitation can lead to a second chance, and where wrongs from the past will not deprive an individual of the opportunity to move forward’.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.