In Brief
- Veteran judge dies: US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who was presiding over the trial of deposed Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, has died at the age of 92.
- The Maduro case: Hellerstein had overseen the sprawling Venezuelan drug-trafficking case for over a decade, prior to Maduro’s capture by US forces in January.
- High-profile rulings: Appointed in 1998, Hellerstein also presided over 9/11 civil litigation and made key rulings against the US government and President Donald Trump.
NEW YORK, United States (AFP) — Alvin Hellerstein, the veteran US federal judge overseeing the drug-trafficking case against deposed Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, has died aged 92, a court official confirmed on Wednesday.
His death was confirmed to AFP by an official at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, where he presided.
As one of the country’s oldest serving federal judges, Hellerstein had faced questions over whether he was the right jurist to preside over what is expected to be a prolonged trial for Maduro, who was seized by US forces in January during a military raid on his compound in Venezuela.
Hellerstein had handled the sprawling drug-trafficking case linked to Maduro for more than a decade—a prosecution that had already secured the conviction of Venezuela’s former intelligence chief, Hugo Armando Carvajal.
A storied legal career
Throughout his lengthy career on the bench, Hellerstein presided over several major, high-profile cases. Notably, he oversaw the civil litigation arising from Al-Qaeda’s 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, frequently rejecting settlement deals he viewed as unfair to the complainants.
He also tangled with US President Donald Trump, rejecting a request to have the president’s New York hush-money case moved to a federal court. Additionally, last year, Hellerstein blocked the Trump administration from deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members without a court hearing.
In another landmark ruling in 2015, Hellerstein ordered the US government to release a trove of photographs depicting the abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More recently, he presided over a trial last year in which a jury found that French banking giant BNP Paribas’s operations in Sudan had helped prop up the regime of former ruler Omar al-Bashir, resulting in $20.75 million in damages being awarded to three Sudanese plaintiffs.
A graduate of Columbia Law School, Hellerstein served as a lawyer in the US Army from 1957 to 1960 before entering private practice. He was nominated to the federal bench in the Southern District of New York by former president Bill Clinton in 1998.
