After a 20-month court martial, a military judge took less than minute to sentence the 25-year-old soldier and order him to be dishonourably discharged from the Army for passing thousands of classified files to the whistleblowing website.
Although Manning’s jail term was condemned as an “outrage that flies in the face of America’s essential ideals” by his supporters, it was only a third of the possible 90 years he faced after being convicted of espionage and a host of other crimes.
Under military law he will be eligible for parole after just a third of his sentence. Having already served three and a half years, and with a further 112 days taken off by the judge because the Army broke the law by keeping him in solitary confinement for nine months, Manning could in theory be released in around eight years.
This would mean he would be only 33 by the time he emerged from prison.
The ruling, by Colonel Denise Lind, the judge who presided over the trial, is a blow to the US government prosecutors who had asked her to imprison the young soldier for at least 60 years.
After a 20-month court martial, a military judge took less than minute to sentence the 25-year-old soldier and order him to be dishonourably discharged from the Army for passing thousands of classified files to the whistleblowing website.
Although Manning’s jail term was condemned as an “outrage that flies in the face of America’s essential ideals” by his supporters, it was only a third of the possible 90 years he faced after being convicted of espionage and a host of other crimes.
Under military law he will be eligible for parole after just a third of his sentence. Having already served three and a half years, and with a further 112 days taken off by the judge because the Army broke the law by keeping him in solitary confinement for nine months, Manning could in theory be released in around eight years.
This would mean he would be only 33 by the time he emerged from prison.
The ruling, by Colonel Denise Lind, the judge who presided over the trial, is a blow to the US government prosecutors who had asked her to imprison the young soldier for at least 60 years.
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