President Obama Has Commuted The Majority Of Chelsea Manning’s Prison Sentence

President Obama has commuted the large majority of Chelsea Manning's remaining prison sentence, The New York Times reports. Manning has been jailed jailed for seven years of her 35-year sentence, after being convicted of leaking American military and diplomatic secrets to WikiLeaks in 2010.

Under the terms of President Obama’s commutation, announced by the White House on Tuesday, Manning will be released from military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas on May 17, rather than in 2045.

Manning, who was then known as Bradley, deployed to Iraq in 2009 to serve as an intelligence analyst, which gave her to the military's classified computer network. She copied hundreds of thousands of incident logs from Afghanistan and Iraq, exposing detainee abuses and proving that the civilian death toll in Iraq was much higher than was being reported at the time. In total, she leaked around 700,000 military files and diplomatic cables to Wikileaks.

During her imprisonment, Manning was held in conditions that the UN torture chief described in 2012 as "cruel and inhumane," after finding that Manning was kept in solitary confinement for nearly a year. She has attempted suicide twice during her imprisonment and received solitary confinement after the most recent attempt. She won a long battle to have gender reassignment surgery in 2016 after a successful hunger strike.