A US judge ordered Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning released from jail after one year behind bars on contempt charges for refusing to cooperate in a federal grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks. The order for her immediate release came one day after Manning was hospitalized in Virginia after she reportedly attempted suicide at a federal prison in Alexandria.
Judge Anthony J. Trenga wrote, “The court finds Ms. Manning’s appearance before the grand jury is no longer needed, in light of which her detention no longer serves any coercive purpose.” Judge Trenga, however, rejected a request to cancel the fines imposed against Manning for refusing to testify. Manning will now have to pay $256,000.
Manning and her legal team showed that her imprisonment was nothing but punitive, and thus unjustifiable under the legal statutes governing federal grand juries. Yet for nearly a year, Manning has been caged and fined $1,000 per day. Ever since she was subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury, which is investigating WikiLeaks, Manning has also insisted that there was never any justifiable purpose to asking her to testify.
In 2013, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for leaking documents and video to WikiLeaks showing evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Obama granted her clemency in 2017. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been charged in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia for violating the Espionage Act, and is accused of helping Manning try to access the Department of Defense computers. Assange is fighting extradition from London.
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President Obama has commuted more sentences than any other president in U.S. History. He recently commuted the sentence of some high profile prisoners. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning, Puerto Rican independence activist Oscar López Rivera and retired U.S. Marine Corps General James Cartwright had their sentences commuted as part of more than 200 commutations issued on January 17th.
Chelsea Manning is now set to be freed on May 17, after Obama shortened her sentence from 35 years to seven. Manning is already the longest-held whistleblower in U.S. history. Manning leaked more than 700,000 classified files and videos to WikiLeaks about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy. While serving her sentence she has seen long stretches of solitary confinement and has been denied medical treatment related to her gender identity. She attempted to commit suicide twice last year.
Puerto Rican independence activist Oscar López Rivera has been imprisoned for almost 35 years with a lot of that time served in solitary confinement. In 1981, López Rivera was convicted on federal charges including seditious conspiracy—conspiring to oppose U.S. authority over Puerto Rico by force. In 1999, President Bill Clinton commuted the sentences of 16 members of the FALN, but López Rivera refused to accept the deal because it did not include two fellow activists, who have since been released. Under Obama’s commutation order, López Rivera will be released on May 17th as well.
U.S. Marine Corps General James Cartwright also received a pardon. Last year, Cartwright, a retired U.S. Marine Corps general with 40 years of service behind him, admitted that he lied to the FBI during an investigation into who leaked classified information to a New York Times reporter. The top secret information leaked, was about Stuxnet, a secret U.S. cyberwarfare operation against Iran. He was due to be sentenced this month. Cartwright’s defense team had asked for a year of probation and 600 hours of community service, but prosecutors had asked the judge overseeing his case to send him to prison for two years.
President Obama granted another 330 commutations on the last day of his presidency, January 19th. The majority of the sentences commuted Thursday were for nonviolent drug offenses. Throughout his presidency, Obama has granted 1,715 commutations—more than any other president in U.S. history. Of those, 568 inmates had been sentenced to life in prison.
In Obama’s second-term, he had made great effort to try to remedy the consequences of decades of excessive sentencing requirements that he said had imprisoned thousands of non-violent drug offenders for too long. To be eligible for a commutation under Obama’s initiative, non-violent offenders had to have been well behaved while in prison and already served 10 years, although some exceptions to the 10-year rule were granted.
Obama personally reviewed the case of every inmate who received a commutation. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said the administration reviewed all applications that came in by an end-of-August deadline which was more than 16,000 in total.
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