An email rarely elicits genuine, audible gasps, but I opened one in late 2009 that did just that.

I was a fifth-year federal prosecutor at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, and the Obama administration had just begun to settle in. My colleagues and I learned by email that Attorney General Eric Holder had determined that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad — who had been held in U.S. military custody at Guantánamo Bay since his capture by American forces in Pakistan in 2003 — would stand trial in our ordinary civilian criminal courts. KSM would face a judge and jury in the SDNY, likely in the courthouse a hundred or so steps across the plaza from our office, and less than a mile from the World Trade Center site. It would be the trial of the century, and it would make every other purported trial of the century look like a puppet show.

But the buzz wore off quickly as a bipartisan procession of politicians jumped straight to freakout mode: too expensive; too dangerous; terrorists don’t deserve due process. Eventually, the hand-wringers got their way. Obama and Holder caved to political pressure and pulled the plug. KSM stayed in Guantánamo, where he resides to this day, his case still unresolved — somehow, astonishingly, unforgivably — nearly a quarter-century after the crime.

Nicolás Maduro is no KSM, and the case for his rendition to the United States is far murkier. But if Maduro is going to be held in the custody of the United States, the right move is to give him a trial in our civilian federal courts. While the case poses daunting constitutional and evidentiary challenges, prosecutors in the SDNY are uniquely positioned to obtain a conviction and bring the former Venezuelan leader to justice.

During his initial court appearance on Tuesday, in response to standard questioning by Judge Alvin Hellerstein intended to confirm that Maduro was in fact the person charged in the indictment, Maduro repeatedly offered up gratuitous protestations: “I am innocent,” “I am here kidnapped,” and “I am the president of Venezuela.” Maduro’s proclamations were more than defiant political posturing; they presaged a series of unusual legal arguments that he surely will make to challenge his indictment. Watch for Maduro’s defense team to claim that his abduction in Venezuela violated core precepts of international law, and that he is entitled to immunity from prosecution as a foreign head of state.

He’s unlikely to prevail. The closest precedent is the federal prosecution of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega in the early 1990s. His legalistic arguments about international law and immunity failed, and he was tried, convicted, and sentenced in the United States. As Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck notes in his One First Substack, the Supreme Court (and other federal courts) have been surprisingly permissive of extraterritorial arrests that don’t strictly comport with international law and have allowed federal prosecutions to proceed even in cases where a defendant has been forcibly kidnapped by U.S. authorities in a foreign country.

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