ABC News reported that Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, each pleaded not guilty Thursday to new federal charges accusing them of torturing people, including Americans, after an arraignment at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Federal Courthouse in New York.
Maduro faced a superseding indictment on one count of conspiracy to commit torture. Flores faced one count of conspiracy to commit torture and one count of narcoterrorism. The case now points toward a trial date of June 14, 2027.
Federal prosecutors say the pair helped build and run a repressive system inside Venezuelan prisons. Maduro rejected the paper on the spot and called the torture claims false. The courtroom clash puts alleged abuse of detainees, including Americans, into a U.S. criminal docket already loaded with narcoterrorism and drug trafficking counts.
The hearing took place on October 15, 2026. Maduro appeared in a beige jail smock over a brown T-shirt and glasses. He greeted the audience with a wave and shook hands with his attorneys before the court took up the new charging document.
When the court asked how he pleaded, Maduro answered in open court and refused to accept the indictment as written.
Maduro told the court he rejected the filing in full.
"I reject this document in its entirety."
He also labeled the torture accusations "false." Breitbart reported a longer version of his rejection, with Maduro denouncing "false accusations and false testimony," and recorded Flores stating she was completely innocent and not guilty as the not-guilty pleas were entered.
NYPD officers stood outside the courthouse while the arraignment moved forward inside. The new pleas sit on top of earlier not-guilty pleas to narcoterrorism and drug trafficking charges from the couple’s first U.S. court appearance after their capture.
Prosecutors unsealed the criminal indictment last week. It accuses Maduro of conspiring with Flores to torture people held in Venezuelan prisons. The charges say the alleged victims included Americans.
The indictment traces the alleged conduct to the start of Maduro’s presidency. It claims he gave authorization and kept control of a machinery of abuse aimed at political opponents.
The charging document alleged a sweeping design of state violence in plain terms.
"When Maduro became President of Venezuela in or about 2013, he authorized the use of torture against specific individuals and oversaw a system designed to use torture, military detention, and violence as a means of repression against the political opposition."
Prosecutors further alleged that Maduro "presided over this system of repression and torture" and that Flores helped him develop it. The indictment also accused his government of torturing Americans because Maduro "assigned blame to the United States for the instability in Venezuela."
Breitbart’s account of the same charging theory described an alleged state-sponsored repression system said to involve electric shock, asphyxiation, rape, and other tortures dating back to 2013. Those graphic methods remain allegations in a pending case. No conviction has been entered on the torture conspiracy counts.
Maduro stands charged with a single torture-conspiracy count in the superseding indictment. Flores faces the torture-conspiracy count plus a narcoterrorism count. The distinction matters for trial structure, sentencing exposure, and how the proof may be organized if the case reaches a jury in 2027.
U.S. forces captured Maduro and Flores in a military operation in Caracas. Their first U.S. court appearance followed in January. At that appearance, both pleaded not guilty to narcoterrorism and drug trafficking charges and maintained their innocence.
Fox News reported on that earlier New York federal appearance, describing Maduro’s not-guilty plea on narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, and machine gun and destructive device charges, with Flores also pleading not guilty on related counts after the raid. In that proceeding, Maduro insisted he remained president and declared himself innocent while the court kept the case on a controlled schedule. He has been held in a Brooklyn federal jail facility as the litigation continues.
The torture conspiracy counts arrive as a separate charging wave on a superseding indictment, not as a quiet revise of the drug case. Breitbart noted the pair have remained detained at MDC Brooklyn and face the drug trafficking trial track tied to the June 2027 setting. The court has now fixed trial for June 14, 2027, giving prosecutors and defense teams a long runway to litigate motions, discovery fights, and any claim that could knock out part of the case before jury selection.
Maduro’s lawyer argued in a court filing last month that the former president is immune from prosecution because he was the leader of a sovereign nation. That filing frames a classic head-of-state defense. It seeks to convert political status into a shield against a U.S. criminal judgment.
The arraignment itself shows the prosecution is moving ahead anyway. A not-guilty plea is not a ruling on immunity. It is the defendant’s formal denial of the charged conduct while the court keeps jurisdiction and sets a trial calendar. Investigators and prosecutors still have to prove each element of conspiracy to commit torture beyond a reasonable doubt if the counts survive pretrial attack.
Core questions for the litigation are straightforward in plain English. Did a conspiracy exist. Did the defendants join it. Did the alleged agreements and acts fit the torture statutes charged. Which detainees, including any Americans, does the government put before the jury. What documents, testimony, and forensic proof tie Maduro and Flores to authorization, direction, or operational help.
Authorities have not publicly detailed in the available court coverage the names of specific alleged American victims or the full docket text of every statute cited. The indictment’s unsealed narrative, as described in reporting on the arraignment, is the public backbone for now. No public results have been released in that coverage disposing of the immunity motion one way or the other.
The dispute is sharp and on the record. Prosecutors describe a system of repression and torture used against political opposition and tied, in their telling, to blame cast on the United States. Maduro rejects the indictment "in its entirety" and calls the torture accusations "false." Flores, in the Breitbart account of the plea proceeding, said she was completely innocent and not guilty.
Those are irreconcilable positions. A federal trial is built to test them under rules of evidence, not under press releases. The superseding indictment supplies the government’s theory from "in or about 2013" forward. The defense supplies denial and, through counsel’s earlier filing, a sovereign-immunity claim aimed at stopping the prosecution before the merits.
File images from Caracas still show Maduro and Flores in power politics mode, including a January 10, 2025 swearing-in scene at the National Assembly for a third term. The New York docket shows a different reality: jail clothes, a federal bench, and a 2027 trial clock.
Between now and June 14, 2027, the court will have to manage a dense pretrial phase. Expect litigation over the scope of the superseding indictment, the relationship between the torture conspiracy proof and the older narcoterrorism and drug counts, and the defense bid for immunity grounded in Maduro’s former role as a national leader.
Prosecutors must convert indictment language into admissible proof of agreement and conduct. Defense counsel must attack the charging theory, the evidence, and the court’s power to sit in judgment of a man they cast as a protected sovereign actor. Flores’s separate narcoterrorism count adds another track of risk and proof unique to her side of the caption.
None of that is resolved by a not-guilty plea. The plea preserves every defense and forces the government to carry its burden. It also locks in a public record: the United States has placed alleged torture of prisoners, including Americans, at the center of a New York federal case against Venezuela’s former power couple.
When a captured foreign leader stands in a U.S. courtroom and answers torture charges with a flat denial, the test is no longer street rhetoric. It is whether American law can try the allegation cleanly, prove it strictly, and hold power to the same rules it creates for everyone else.
