From a courthouse on the grounds of the Ft. Meade military base outside of Baltimore, Maryland Tuesday afternoon, Col. Denise Lind said she would not relinquish charges against Pfc Manning, a 25-year-old soldier alleged to have given roughly 250,000 US State Department diplomatic cables and a trove of other sensitive information to the WikiLeaks whistleblower site. She did, however, agree to erase nearly four months off any sentence Manning is handed in response to the time he spent detained at a military brig in Quantico, Virginia.

If Manning is convicted of aiding the enemy, the most severe of the nearly two-dozen charges he’s up against, he could be sentenced to life in prison.