President Obama today has communed whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s sentence, letting her leave prison in May. Manning was sentenced to a 35-year sentence for her involvement in leaking classified information via Wikileaks concerning American military and diplomatic activities, activists feel that if Manning was to carry out her entire sentence she would have died in prison—as Manning twice tried to commit suicide,

So far, Manning has been jailed for nearly seven years, but Obama’s announcement today would free her on May 17.

“Chelsea Manning is somebody who went through the military criminal justice process, was exposed to due process, was found guilty, was sentenced for her crimes, and she acknowledged wrongdoing,” White House Spokesman Joshua Earnest said.

According to the NYTimes:

In her commutation application, Ms. Manning said she had not imagined that she would be sentenced to the “extreme” term of 35 years, a term for which there was “no historical precedent.” (There have only been a handful of leak cases, and most sentence are in the range of one to three years.) “I take full and complete responsibility for my decision to disclose these materials to the public,” she wrote. “I have never made any excuses for what I did. I pleaded guilty without the protection of a plea agreement because I believed the military justice system would understand my motivation for the disclosure and sentence me fairly. I was wrong.”

The ACLU Released the following statement:

“I’m relieved and thankful that the president is doing the right thing and commuting Chelsea Manning’s sentence,” said Chase Strangio, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT Project representing Manning. “Since she was first taken into custody, Chelsea has been subjected to long stretches of solitary confinement — including for attempting suicide — and has been denied access to medically necessary health care. This move could quite literally save Chelsea’s life, and we are all better off knowing that Chelsea Manning will walk out of prison a free woman, dedicated to making the world a better place and fighting for justice for so many.”