Chelsea Manning has been released from jail
Chelsea Manning was released from jail Thursday after spending 62 days at a Virginia detention center for refusing to comply with a grand jury subpoena. Manning was released after the grand jury term expired.
A post on Manning’s Twitter account, which was being run by her supporters while she was in jail, said federal prosecutors had subpoenaed her for another grand jury on May 16.
Her lawyers told the Associated Press she will again refuse to answer questions and could again face another term of incarceration.
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Manning, a former Army intelligence officer, was sent to the Alexandria, Virginia facility on March 8. Manning said then she objects to the secrecy of the grand jury process, and said she had already revealed everything she knows at her court martial.
Manning, who is transgender, gained attention after being convicted in 2013 for leaking classified government and military documents to WikiLeaks. She had worked as an intelligence analyst in Iraq and was arrested in 2010. At the time of her arrest, her name was Bradley.
She served seven years of a 35-year military sentence for leaking the trove of documents to the anti-secrecy website before then-President Obama commuted her sentence in 2017 — one of his final acts as president. In May that year, she was released from a Kansas military prison.
Earlier this week, Manning’s lawyers filed court papers arguing that she should not be jailed for civil contempt because she has proven that she will stick to her principles and won’t testify no matter how long she’s jailed.
Federal law only allows a recalcitrant witness to be jailed on civil contempt if there’s a chance that the incarceration will coerce the witness into testifying. If a judge were to determine that incarcerating Manning were punitive rather than coercive, Manning would not be jailed.
“At this point, given the sacrifices she has already made, her strong principles, her strong and growing support community, and the disgrace attendant to her capitulation, it is inconceivable that Chelsea Manning will ever change her mind about her refusal to cooperate with the grand jury,” her lawyers wrote.
Manning filed an eight-page statement with the court on Monday, outlining her resolve. She wrote that “cooperation with this grand jury is simply not an option. Doing so would mean throwing away all of my principles, accomplishments, sacrifices, and erase decades of my reputation – an obvious impossibility,” she wrote.
She also said she was suffering disproportionately in jail because of physical problems related with inadequate follow-up care to gender-reassignment surgery.
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