Alvin K. Hellerstein, the senior federal judge who was overseeing the criminal case against ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, died on Wednesday morning at the age of 92, surrounded by his family. His death ends 28 years on the Manhattan federal bench — and by Wednesday afternoon, court records show, the Maduro case had been reassigned to U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres, ahead of the trial Hellerstein had scheduled for June 2027.
Chief Judge Laura Taylor Swain, in a statement for the court, called Hellerstein “an insightful and dedicated lawyer” who had served with distinction. “His energetic and dedicated service to this court continued until his death,” she said. “He is greatly appreciated and will be sorely missed.” Edward Friedland, the district executive for the Southern District courts, confirmed the death; no cause was provided. Hellerstein's funeral is scheduled for Thursday at Riverside Memorial Chapel in Manhattan; his other pending cases will be reassigned among the court's judges.
Hellerstein worked until the end. Just two weeks before his death, frail and at times struggling to speak, he presided over the arraignment of Maduro and Maduro's wife, Cilia Flores, on new torture charges added to their narco-terrorism case. When Maduro twice refused to enter a plea and instead railed against “false allegations,” the 92-year-old judge cut in: “a plea of not guilty will be entered on behalf of Mr. Maduro.” Days earlier, coughing through a bail hearing for Flores, he had told the lawyers: “I have a voice problem. As long as you can understand — hear me, I'll keep going.” He denied Flores release to home confinement and was resolute that he would preside over the trial himself.
Alvin Kenneth Hellerstein was born in New York City on December 28, 1933, and educated entirely in the city he would judge: the Bronx High School of Science, then Columbia College and Columbia Law School, where he edited the law review. He clerked for a federal judge, served in the Army's Judge Advocate General's Corps, and then spent 38 years at the law firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, rising to co-head its litigation department. President Bill Clinton nominated him to the district court in 1998; the Senate confirmed him by unanimous consent, and he took his seat that October. He took senior status in 2011 but never slowed down, keeping a full docket into his nineties.
The cases that defined him began with the worst day in his city's history. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Hellerstein presided over the vast majority of the civil wrongful-death and property-damage lawsuits that followed, and later over the health claims of the Ground Zero first responders. He was known for meeting victims' families for hours and for rejecting settlements he considered too small. In the same years he ordered the release of the Abu Ghraib detainee-abuse photographs over the government's objections. His courtroom also handled the fraud trials of Archegos founder Bill Hwang, sentenced to 18 years after his fund's collapse cost banks more than $10 billion, and of startup founder Charlie Javice, sentenced to seven years for defrauding JPMorgan Chase of $175 million, and the landmark BNP Paribas verdict for Sudanese refugees.
Presidents felt his independence too. Twice, Hellerstein spurned Donald Trump's effort to move his Manhattan criminal case into federal court and erase his May 2024 hush money conviction on presidential-immunity grounds — most recently in August, in one of his last significant rulings. In 2020 he ordered Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen freed from prison, finding the Justice Department had retaliated against him for writing a book; in 2025 he ruled Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans invalid. An Orthodox Jew, he explained his philosophy in a 2013 law review article: “As a judge, and as a Jew, I consider that everything I do reflects God and affects His image.”
The case he leaves behind is one of the most extraordinary ever brought in an American courtroom. The indictment of Nicolás Maduro was filed in 2011 and unsealed in 2020. In its own terms, it charges the Venezuelan leader with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess them — alleging that he and his associates conspired with Colombia's FARC guerrillas to flood the United States with cocaine. His former intelligence chief, Hugo Carvajal, has already pleaded guilty. In January, in a surprise U.S. military raid in Caracas, Maduro and Flores were captured and flown to New York, where they are held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. A superseding indictment added Flores to the case, and in July Hellerstein, at the request of lawyers on both sides, set the trial for June 2027.
Then, on October 8, prosecutors unsealed a further superseding indictment adding a charge American courts have almost never aimed at a former head of state: conspiracy to commit torture. The indictment alleges that Maduro's government “presided over a system of repression that relied on violence against political opposition, arbitrary detention, and the torture of detainees, including United States citizens” — naming electric shock, asphyxiation, rape, forced nudity, prolonged isolation and starvation. The charge carries a maximum of life in prison if any of the alleged torture caused a death. Both have pleaded not guilty to everything, and their lawyers are fighting to have the case thrown out on sovereign-immunity grounds, which the Justice Department formally opposed this month. That fight, like every other part of the case, now lands on a new desk.
Judge Torres is no stranger to the building or to difficult criminal cases. A Harvard graduate with a Columbia law degree, she spent more than a decade on New York's state benches — the city's criminal and civil courts, then as a state Supreme Court justice handling felony trials — before President Barack Obama nominated her to the federal court. She was confirmed in April 2013. She also has a thread of her own running to this case: she once served on an international delegation that monitored Venezuela's 2006 presidential election, won by Maduro's predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chávez. What she inherits is the case exactly as Hellerstein left it — the same charges, pleas and immunity battle, and the same June 2027 trial date on the calendar. Court officials said it was not immediately clear whether the change of judge would affect that schedule; nothing about the reassignment, which followed the court's ordinary process for a judge who dies in office, alters the evidence gathered or the rulings already made.
There is a plain American point in Wednesday's quiet handover. A former head of state stands accused in Manhattan of conspiring with terrorists to pour cocaine into the United States and of torturing his own people, including Americans, to hold power. The judge who was to try him served 28 years, worked until the morning he died at 92, and within hours the case had passed, by the court's ordinary rules, to another judge — no pause in the prosecution, no advantage to either side, the defendants' pleas and rights intact. Even Maduro's own lawyer, Barry Pollack, paused the fight to say: “We were saddened to learn of Judge Hellerstein's passing and offer our condolences to his family.” The trial of Nicolás Maduro will go forward. It will simply be called to order by a different voice.
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