Maduro and Flores plead not guilty to expanded torture conspiracy charges in Manhattan

Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela's ousted president, and his wife, Cilia Flores, pleaded not guilty this month in a Manhattan federal court to an expanded indictment. The new indictment adds a charge of conspiracy to commit torture. Prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) filed it on October 8 at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse. Maduro is 63 and Flores is 70. Their joint trial is scheduled to open in June 2027.

U.S. forces captured the couple in Caracas in January 2026, in an operation ordered by President Donald Trump. They were then taken to New York. The first filings centred on four counts: a narco-terrorism conspiracy, a cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and a conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices, according to Reuters and AP. At the October 8 hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Sullivan presented a revised indictment that invokes 18 U.S.C. § 2340A, a 1994 federal law on torture committed abroad. Sullivan said cooperating witnesses will tie Maduro and Flores directly to the structure of the alleged torture conspiracy. The charges are allegations, and neither defendant has been tried. Earlier Crisis.Zone coverage traced the collapse of Maduro's government.

A seldom-used law and the capture that unlocked it

Congress passed the statute to meet U.S. obligations under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which was signed during Ronald Reagan's presidency. It covers offences committed outside the United States only if the accused is a U.S. national or is later found physically present in the country. The transfer from Caracas to New York put both defendants on U.S. soil, which satisfies that condition.

Few people have faced the law. Reuters identified eight people charged under it since 1994, and Maduro and Flores are the seventh and eighth. Four have been convicted. They include paramilitaries from Liberia and Gambia, a prison chief under Syria's Bashar al-Assad, and an American contractor who ran an illegal arms factory in Iraq. Sentences ran from 60 to 97 years.

Outcomes have varied. A federal jury in Chattanooga, Tennessee, acquitted Sead Miljkovic of torture charges in 2025, and he later pleaded to passport fraud. Sulejman Mujagic, a Bosnian-era defendant, was sent back to Bosnia in 2013 rather than tried in New York.

Michel Paradis, a partner at the law firm Steptoe and a veteran Guantánamo defense lawyer, said: "This really is a landmark case."

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Observers are reading: how the torture count reshapes the witness list, with the indictment's alleged methods and the lawyers' own assessments of the risk.

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Immunity fight and the road to June 2027

Prosecutors charged conspiracy, not direct commission of torture. They have explicitly taken the death penalty off the table. Direct torture resulting in death can carry life imprisonment or death. Individual counts here carry statutory sentences of up to 20 years per violation.

The defense has signalled its main line. Mark Donnelly and Andrés Sánchez, lawyers for Flores, say she is "completely innocent." They plan to amend their motion to dismiss on head-of-state sovereign immunity. They argue that a foreign leader cannot face a U.S. criminal court for official acts. Prosecutors are expected to answer that torture violates peremptory norms of international law (jus cogens) and cannot count as legitimate state conduct.