Obama's act of simple decency

Why commuting Chelsea Manning's sentence was unquestionably the right thing to do

President Obama.
(Image credit: Pete Souza, courtesy The White House Flickr)

It was an act of simple decency. On Tuesday, President Barack Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, who was serving a 35-year sentence for leaking a large trove of classified information. This was unquestionably the right thing to do, and helps redress a civil liberties record that is a relative weak spot in Obama's legacy.

This is not to say that the decision to charge Manning was, in itself, indefensible. There is no question that Manning giving classified materials to WikiLeaks was illegal. Should she have been exempted from prosecution as a whistleblower? It's not an absurd argument. Certainly, much of the information she released — such as video of an appalling helicopter attack on a crowd in Baghdad that killed two Reuters reporters whose cameras were misidentified as guns — was unquestionably in the public interest.

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Scott Lemieux

Scott Lemieux is a professor of political science at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y., with a focus on the Supreme Court and constitutional law. He is a frequent contributor to the American Prospect and blogs for Lawyers, Guns and Money.