Cuban torturer convicted in Miami

MIAMI, Aug. 1 (UPI) -- A federal court jury convicted Eriberto Mederos Thursday of lying to immigration officers about his past by denying he tortured political prisoners with electro-shock treatments 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. Sentencing was set for Oct. 16 by U.S. District Judge Alan Gold.

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.

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 the resisted the interrogation of the political police.

Defense attorney David Rothman told the jury his client did not use electroshock as a method of torture and stressed that Mederos treated only those who had a medical prescription.

Most of the witnesses accused Mederos of torturing them at the hospital during a period from 1968 to 1978. They testified the sessions took place on a floor covered with urine and feces and that they received no medication.