Manning's best bet would be to make an unsworn heroic sounding testimony. This way, he has a good chance of getting a full presidential pardon from whoever is the good guy in office after nobel laureate obama.
Garry is wrong. What looks visually pleasing is not necessarily the right layout.
Historically, typesetters only had paragraphs to set in doing a book layout. Now in the age of post DTP, layout can be more expressive. That is exactly what the lesser margin of 8px does. In this case, it means that you are liking the status message only 8px away, and not liking the author.