Chelsea Manning has filed an appeal against her conviction for passing more than 700,000 documents to Wikileaks in 2010 which landed her with a 35-year prison sentence under the Espionage Act. On Thursday lawyers for the whistleblower called her conviction “grossly unfair and unprecedented” arguing that “no whistleblower in American history has been sentenced this harshly.” The Intercept reports: Manning was convicted of six counts of espionage by a military court in 2013 and is currently serving a 35-year sentence in military prison. In January 2010, while serving as an Army intelligence analyst overseas, Manning – then known as Bradley — sent hundreds of thousands of documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to WikiLeaks. The documents revealed dramatically higher numbers of civilian casualties than were publicly reported and featured a video of Apache attack helicopters in Baghdad gunning down two Reuters journalists. Manning’s treatment in military court came under fire from journalists and free speech advocates. Because she was indicted under the Espionage Act, she was not allowed to raise the public interest value of her disclosures as a defense. In the 209-page legal brief made public on Thursday, lawyers for Manning questioned the testimony of military officials at her trial, [...]