As Cilia Flores, the wife of the ousted Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, has sat in a Brooklyn jail cell, she has experienced a few of the issues that plague America’s troubled federal lockups.
A fight broke out in her unit, leading guards to deploy pepper spray that left her with chest tightness. She has lost 25 pounds and two molar teeth, and her heart condition has worsened. Her lawyer has asked a judge to release her to private home detention in New York — which would be paid for by the Venezuelan government — so that she can be properly treated.
The request, while unlikely to be granted, is not unusual. To varying levels of success, wealthy defendants have often tried to leverage their money to avoid incarceration in America’s troubled federal jails. On Thursday morning, the judge overseeing the case, Alvin K. Hellerstein, will hear arguments from prosecutors and Ms. Flores’s lawyers on the matter.
Advocates for indigent defendants have long argued that the notion that a defendant can buy their way out of jail is unfair. And in recent court filings, federal prosecutors in Manhattan have argued that granting Ms. Flores’s request would create a two-tiered system of bail, in which wealthy defendants like her could pay for a private jail while poorer defendants would remain detained.
“This is nothing more than an attempt to leverage her wealth to receive special treatment that is forbidden under the law,” federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York wrote last month.
The federal trial for Mr. Maduro, 63, and Ms. Flores, 69, is scheduled for June 2027. Both have pleaded not guilty to conspiring to commit narco-terrorism and import cocaine, along with other charges.
Courts have often acknowledged clear inequities in denying requests like Ms. Flores’s. In 2016, Judge Richard M. Berman denied release to Reza Zarrab, a Turkish gold trader charged with evading sanctions, writing that Mr. Zarrab’s $50 million bond proposal would help “foster inequity and unequal treatment in favor of a very small cohort of criminal defendants who are extremely wealthy.”
Sometimes, judges have granted such proposals. In 2009, a federal judge allowed Marc Dreier, a Manhattan lawyer accused of defrauding investors of $700 million, to stay at his Upper East Side apartment on a $10 million bond while awaiting trial. He wound up pleading guilty and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
As first lady, Ms. Flores amassed vast wealth by tapping a network of corruption, experts say. After rising through the ranks of Venezuelan national politics as an ally of Hugo Chávez, Mr. Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, Ms. Flores was widely seen as holding influence over Venezuela’s justice system.
Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores were seized from a Caracas compound in a U.S. military operation in January. During the capture, Ms. Flores sustained “permanent scarring by her captors,” including injuries to her face, forehead and abdomen, wrote Mark Donnelly, a lawyer for Ms. Flores.
Since January, Ms. Flores has been jailed at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a violent and troubled federal lockup in Brooklyn. Her health has worsened in jail, and she needs a medical procedure to treat her heart condition, Mr. Donnelly has written in court filings.
In September, lawyers for Mr. Maduro and Ms. Flores wrote to Judge Hellerstein, arguing for the dismissal of charges on the grounds of sovereign immunity, which would mean their clients were immune from prosecution in a U.S. court. That issue is scheduled to be argued before Judge Hellerstein next month.
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