51% Believe Manning Should Have to Serve Entire Sentence
Friday, August 23, 2013
Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Bradley, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for releasing classified government documents to the website WikiLeaks. A plurality of Americans says that punishment is about right and half believe there shouldn’t be a possibility of parole.
Forty-two percent (42%) of Likely Voters believe the 35-year sentence handed down to Manning is about right, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. But one in three voters (32%) says the sentence is not severe enough. Nineteen percent (19%) consider the punishment too severe. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
It should be noted that Rasmussen Reports conducted the poll prior to Manning announcing she identifies as a female and used her original name in the question wording.
The national survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on August 21-22, 2013 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.