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Cuban Torturer Convicted in Miami NewsMax.com WiresMIAMI – A federal court jury Thursday convicted Eriberto Mederos of lying to immigration officers about his past by denying he tortured political prisoners with electricity when he was a nurse in Cuba. Mederos, 79, could be sentenced to as many as five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and deportation. U.S. District Judge Alan Gold scheduled sentencing for Oct. 16. The jury of eight non-Hispanic whites, two blacks and two Hispanics, one of them Cuban-born, deliberated for 12 hours over three days after seven days of testimony by 16 witnesses. Mederos entered the United States in 1984 on an immigrant's visa and obtained U.S. citizenship in 1993. He was charged with four counts of giving false testimony to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. 'Diabolical' In closing arguments Tuesday, prosecutor Frank Tamen said Mederos was a "diabolical servant of a communist tyranny. "Mederos was an arm of the state security, whose mission it was to extract information from the opposition to maintain the communist regime in power," Tamen said. He said Mederos was a nurse at the Mazorra psychiatric hospital and applied the shock treatment to people with no record of mental illness who were taken to the hospital because they resisted the political police's interrogation. Defense attorney David Rothman claimed to the jury that his client did not use electroshock as torture and that Mederos treated only those who had a medical prescription. Most of the witnesses accused Mederos of torturing them at the hospital from 1968 to 1978. They testified that the sessions took place on a floor covered with urine and feces and that they received no medication.
Copyright 2002 by United Press International. All rights reserved.
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