By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK, Oct 21 (Reuters) - Nicolas Maduro is one of just a handful of people to be charged in the US with violating a federal law criminalizing torture committed overseas, a Reuters review of court records found, as prosecutors seek to broaden their criminal case against the ousted Venezuelan president.
Maduro, 63, and his wife Cilia Flores, 70, pleaded not guilty last week to an expanded indictment accusing them of conspiring to torture political opponents to remain in power, in addition
to the drug trafficking charges they already faced. They are scheduled to go on trial in June 2027.
Maduro and Flores, captured in January during a US military raid in Caracas ordered by President Donald Trump, are just the seventh and eighth people Reuters identified who have been charged with violating a 1994 law criminalizing acts of torture. The law defines torture as an act intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering on a person in custody.
Four people have been convicted under the statute, including members of paramilitary forces in Liberia and Gambia, the head of a Syrian prison under ousted President Bashar al-Assad, and a US citizen who developed an illegal arms factory in Iraq.
The Maduro case marks the first time the United States has prosecuted a head of state for allegedly authorizing the use of torture in their country, according to Michel Paradis, a partner at the Steptoe law firm.
"This really is a landmark case," said Paradis, who previously represented detainees at the Guantanamo Bay US naval base.
The torture charges mark a substantial shift in the focus of the case against Maduro and Flores. While they remain accused of abusing their power to help drug traffickers and enrich themselves, the new charges mean that alleged human rights abuses during the political upheaval that often marked Maduro's 13 years in office will become central to the trial.
'A SIGNIFICANT ESCALATION'
The torture charge could strengthen the hand of prosecutors by allowing them to tell a more comprehensive story about how Maduro allegedly employed a wide range of criminal activity to stay in power, and by enabling them to call more sympathetic witnesses, legal experts said.
"The torture charge is really a significant escalation," said Artie McConnell, a former federal prosecutor focused on national security issues.
"It puts these torture and political repression elements at the center of the government's theory," McConnell added, referring to the prosecution.
Lawyers for Maduro did not respond to requests for comment.
Mark Donnelly and Andres Sanchez, lawyers for Flores, said she is "completely innocent" of all charges. They said they would revise a motion they previously made to dismiss the indictment on the basis of sovereign immunity — protection from prosecution as the head of a sovereign country — to account for the new charges.
A spokesperson for the Manhattan US Attorney's office, which brought the charges, declined to comment.
COOPERATING WITNESSES
The 1994 law was passed by Congress to make good on US obligations under the United Nations Convention against Torture, signed during President Ronald Reagan's tenure.
Under the law, each torture count is punishable by up to 20 years in prison, or by a life sentence or the death penalty if the victim dies due to the torture. People convicted of multiple acts of torture can receive longer sentences. Those convicted under the statute so far have received prison sentences of 60 to 97 years.
Maduro and Flores are not eligible for the death penalty because they are charged with torture conspiracy, not with carrying out torture themselves.
US prosecutors can bring torture charges only against defendants who are US nationals or who are physically present in the United States. The charges against Maduro and Flores came after they were brought to New York following the raid in Caracas.
Many of the other defendants in US torture cases had moved to or attempted to enter the United States after the alleged torture.
McConnell, a partner at law firm BakerHostetler, said the new indictment was more detailed than the previous one, citing the descriptions of alleged torture victims and incidents.
In one 2018 incident described in the indictment, prosecutors said Venezuelan military officers hit a detainee with a machete and sprayed him with a chemical irritant while interrogating him about the whereabouts of a Maduro political opponent.
Jurors could find testimony from alleged torture victims to be powerful, said Shane Stansbury, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan.
Three of the alleged torture victims in the indictment are American citizens, and their testimony could resonate particularly strongly among the jurors, McConnell said.
A trial on the drug trafficking charges alone likely would have relied heavily on the testimony of cooperating witnesses, who may have played a role in the alleged crimes themselves. Defense lawyers often question cooperating witnesses sharply about their own criminal histories on cross-examination to try to undercut their credibility.
To be sure, cooperating witnesses are still likely to prove critical in helping prosecutors link Maduro and Flores to the alleged torture, experts said.
Kevin Sullivan, a prosecutor with the Manhattan US Attorney's office, said in an October 8 court hearing that cooperating witnesses would testify about alleged involvement by Maduro and Flores in the torture conspiracy.
ACQUITTAL IN TENNESSEE
Not every torture case the US has brought has resulted in a conviction.
One defendant, an upstate New York resident named Sulejman Mujagic who was charged in the US in 2012 with torturing a soldier after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, was instead extradited to Bosnia for trial in 2013.
Another defendant charged over alleged torture in Bosnia, Sead Miljkovic, was found not guilty of US torture charges by a jury in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2025 but later pleaded guilty to passport fraud. He has since left the US, according to his lawyer, Bryan Hoss.
Hoss said the accounts given by the alleged victims who testified in the case had shifted over time, undercutting their credibility, and that the abuse allegedly committed by his client did not rise to the level of torture. Hoss also said that jurors may have questioned why the US government was prosecuting the case.
Jurors in the Maduro trial may not have similar concerns.
"The fact that these are filed against the former head of the country allows people to understand it a little better," Hoss said.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York;Editing by Noeleen Walder and Will Dunham)
