ALEXANDRIA, VA. • A former Air Force intelligence analyst who once helped find targets for deadly U.S. drone strikes was sentenced to 45 months in prison for leaking top-secret details about the program.

Daniel Hale, 33, told a federal judge he felt compelled to leak information to a journalist out of guilt over his own participation in a program that he believed was indiscriminately killing civilians in Afghanistan far from the battlefield.

“It is wrong to kill,” Hale said in a defiant statement in which he accepted responsibility for his actions, but also pleaded for mercy. “It is especially wrong to kill the defenseless.”

But U.S. District Judge Liam O’grady told Hale he had other avenues for airing his concerns. Citing the need to deter others from illegal disclosures, he imposed a punishment that was harsher than the 12- to 18-month term sought by Hale’s attorneys but much more lenient than the sentence sought by prosecutors.

“You could have resigned from the military,” or told “your commanders you weren’t going to do this anymore,”

O’grady told Hale.

The prosecution is one in a series of cases the Justice Department has brought in recent years against current and former government officials who have disclosed classified secrets to journalists. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced new guidelines this month to bar prosecutors from subpoenaing journalists’ records in leak probes, but the department has shown no signs of scaling back efforts to charge officials whom they identify as having leaked national security information.