Manning plead guilty to 10 lesser charges out of a total of 22. Today, he was also found guilty of violating five counts of the Espionage Act.
The most serious charge he faced was “aiding the enemy,” which could carry a life sentence. The prosecution chose not to pursue capital punishment, which was an option.
Manning, a 25-year-old US private, downloaded more than 700,000 classified documents from US military servers and passed them to WikiLeaks.
NBC News writes some of the classified documents leaked by Manning “ended up in the hands of Osama bin Laden and were recovered in the raid on his compound by U.S. Navy Seals in Abbottabad, Pakistan.”
The sentencing process will begin tomorrow morning at 9:30 EST. Guardian reporter Ed Pilkington tweeted recently he predicts Manning could face a possible “top sentence of at least 130 years in military jail.”
Journalists at Fort Meade were not permitted to report the verdict directly from the courtroom, or to leave the courtroom until permitted by the judge, as BoingBoing writes.
