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Comment by jamesroseman | Hacker News Reader

"He faced up to 90 years in prison."

I think that, all things considered, this is the best possible outcome (realistically). There was no way he'd walk, because he did break laws. In this instance those laws were broken to get information out to the public, but one can easily imagine when those laws could be broken for more malicious purposes. If you leave this unpunished, they might think this opens up the floodgates. The powers that be would most likely prefer to deter 100 whistleblowers if it means stopping the one person who'd use the information for terrible ends.

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> In this instance those laws were broken to get information out to the public, but one can easily imagine when those laws could be broken for more malicious purposes. If you leave this unpunished, they might think this opens up the floodgates.

I'm not going to comment about the length of the sentence itself. But sentencing is supposed to take into account the exact details of the offence. "one can easily imagine when those laws could be broken for more malicious purposes" is a reason why somebody breaking laws for more malicious purposes should get a longer sentence. So your argument actually works the other way: it explains why Manning might have been expected to get a lesser sentence.

That's silly. Motive is taken into account for everything else. If you kill someone by accident it's different than if you commit premeditated murder. The person planning to maliciously use classified secrets should expect a stiffer response than a whistleblower like manning.

Edit: Intent, not motive is what I meant to say. Thanks. Point remains though. You can argue that he did deserve something for the reasons rayiner mentions, but you can't argue that he deserves something to make a point to people with malicious intent. If you don't think he had malicious intent, he shouldn't get as much penalty. They should still expect to get the bigger penalty.

Motive isn't taken into account, intent is taken into account, which is a narrower concept. "Intent" goes to whether you did something by accident or on purpose (or something in-between). "Motive" goes to the "why."

So killing a person with your car may be no crime at all if you were driving carefully and he jumped out of nowhere, if you do run over someone on purpose than it doesn't matter why you did so. Maybe he's a doctor who performs abortions and you believe that you're saving babies from being murdered by killing him.[1] That doesn't make it any lesser degree of murder.

[1] I purposefully use that controversial example to make the point that not everyone agrees on the purity of Manning's conduct, just as not everyone agrees on whether abortion is murder or not. Many people believe that indiscriminately leaking hundreds of thousands of documents goes far beyond "whistle-blowing" into conduct intended to maliciously embarrass the United States in diplomatic relations.

He did break laws, but that doesn't necessarily mean he was wrong. This is why jury nullification exists, though I'm not sure if that even exists in a military court.

To support this stance, this comes from the posted article:

“There is value in deterrence, your honor; this court must send a message to any soldier contemplating stealing classified information,” said Capt. Joe Morrow, a military prosecutor. “National security crimes that undermine the entire system must be taken seriously.”

In fact, weren't his lawyers asking for a sentence of 30 years? Sounds like they got almost what they asked for.

"Years faced" is a misleading number, though. I think it's pretty rare that defendants get sentenced to the maximum for each charge. The government was "only" asking for 60.

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