The US Army private who was convicted of turning over a trove of classified Government documents to website WikiLeaks should be sentenced to 60 years in prison, prosecutors said on Monday.
They requested the sentence in closing arguments in the sentencing phase of Private Bradley’s court martial, while his defence pleaded for leniency without suggesting a sentence, reporters in the court said.
Manning’s lawyer David Coombs asked Judge Denise Lind not to “rob him of his youth,” according to the Bradley Manning Support Network.
Prosecutor Captain Joe Morrow however argued, “He betrayed the United States, and for that betrayal he deserves to spend the majority of his remaining life in confinement,” according to The New York Times.
Lind is to begin deliberating on Manning’s sentence on Tuesday.
Last month she pronounced Manning guilty on 20 of 22 charges of espionage and theft of Government documents after a trial that began in early June. He was found not guilty of the most serious charge of aiding the enemy.
She later reduced his maximum potential sentence to 90 years from 136 years.
Manning admitted to copying an estimated 700,000 classified diplomatic and military documents from US Government networks while he was deployed as an intelligence analyst in Iraq, and offering the information to the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy organization.
He earlier admitted in court to sending information to WikiLeaks in what he described as an attempt to spark debate on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In a pre-trial hearing in February, Manning had said he did not believe the cables would damage the US, but would instead be embarrassing as he hoped to spark debate about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.