Bradley Manning's potential sentence cut to 90 years

The military judge who last week convicted soldier Bradley Manning of committing the biggest breach of classified data in US history through WikiLeaks has trimmed the maximum prison sentence Manning could face.

But the 25-year-old former intelligence analyst could still be spending the rest of his life behind bars after Judge Colonel Denise Lind ruled that he could face a maximum sentence of 90, rather than 136 years for turning over more than 700,000 battlefield videos, diplomatic cables and other secret documents to WikiLeaks.

Manning's lawyers had objected that the prosecution was overreaching in seeking separate sentences for all the espionage charges. His lawyers acknowledged that he had downloaded files on different days, but said he had grouped many of them into single files before transmitting them in 2010 to WikiLeaks.

Lind, who convicted Manning of 19 criminal counts, ruled that some resulted from the same sequence of actions and should be merged to avoid "an unreasonable multiplication of charges".

For most of the espionage charges resulting from the transmissions, "there is no evidence of prosecutorial overreaching", Lind said.

The US government contended that releasing classified information threatened national security.