LIMA, Peru (AP) -- Lori Berenson, battling for freedom after more
                 than five years in a Peruvian prison, this week has one last chance
                 to convince judges she had no role in a terrorism plot by leftist rebels.

                 The three judges are widely expected to deliver a guilty verdict against the
                 31-year-old New York native. Peru had hoped the three-month retrial would
                 show off its improved justice system, but Berenson supporters have
                 dismissed it as a sham.

                 It took years of pressure from the United States to win a civilian retrial on lesser
                 charges for Berenson, who was handed a life sentence for treason in 1996 by a
                 secret military court that allowed her hardly any legal representation and no chance
                 to cross-examine witnesses.

                 Since the non-jury retrial began March 20, Berenson has been grilled by judges
                 on charges she helped the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA, in
                 a plot to seize Peru's Congress. She has consistently denied any role.

                 On Wednesday morning, Berenson makes her closing argument to the judges,
                 who are expected to render their verdict the same afternoon. Prosecutors are
                 seeking a 20-year prison sentence.

                 "There has been no presumption of innocence," Berenson's mother, Rhoda, said
                 during an interview in the high-rise apartment she and her husband rented in
                 Lima for the duration of the trial.

                 "The bottom line is there's no hard evidence and even the circumstantial
                 evidence is just that, circumstantial," she said.

                 Berenson's supporters say that even in the second trial, the courts have offered
                 her little justice -- despite Peru's insistence its justice system has improved since
                 the fall of ex-President Alberto Fujimori's autocratic regime last November.

                 Supporters point to the fact that Berenson has been retried under the same
                 draconian anti-terrorism laws decreed by Fujimori in 1992 during a state of
                 emergency, which the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled invalid two
                 years ago and ordered repealed.

                 "The judges acted like prosecutors," said Defense lawyer Jose Luis Sandoval.

                 Sandoval said it would be up to the judges whether to sentence her under the
                 pre-1992 law, which carries a minimum 10-year prison sentence. He promised
                 to appeal any conviction to Peru's Supreme Court and the Inter-American
                 human rights court, the legal arm of the Organization of American States.

                 Berenson was tried for "illicit association" and "terrorist collaboration."

                 The judges have greeted Berenson's arguments with skepticism, even open
                 indignation. Berenson says she had no idea that her roommates in the house she
                 rented in 1995 were guerrillas.

                 In one heated exchange, presiding magistrate Marcos Ibazeta spoke of a "spider
                 web of coincidences" that he argued linked her to the MRTA.

                 Sandoval tried unsuccessfully to have Ibazeta removed from the case. He
                 accused Ibazeta of bias and of being linked to Fujimori's fugitive intelligence
                 chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, who he argued used Berenson as a political pawn
                 for leverage with the United States.

                 The Berensons have made powerful allies in the U.S. Congress, who have
                 lobbied for their daughter's humanitarian release after she spent most of the last
                 five years in a frigid Andean prison.

                 But Peruvian human rights groups have kept their distance from Berenson's
                 cause.

                 "Nobody who has followed the trial at all has a doubt she had some kind of
                 involvement with the MRTA, and specifically with the plan to take over the
                 Congress," said Robert Meza, a staff attorney with Peru's Legal Defense
                 Institute, a human rights organization that has monitored the trial.

                 Berenson had a long history of leftist activism in Latin America before she came
                 to Peru in 1994. She served as personal secretary to a top Salvadoran guerrilla
                 commander during peace talks that ended El Salvador's 12-year civil war in
                 1992.

                 The key witness against her, Pacifico Castrellon, a Panamanian, testified that he
                 and Berenson received money in Ecuador from MRTA's top commander,
                 Nestor Cerpa. Sandoval argued that Castrellon offered false testimony to help
                 his own legal situation.

                 Prosecutors say Berenson posed as a journalist, accompanied by Cerpa's wife,
                 who acted as her photographer, to enter Peru's legislature several times in 1995
                 to gather information. Berenson, who was accredited by two left-leaning U.S.
                 magazines, but never published, insisted she was researching articles about
                 Peruvian women and poverty.

                 Berenson and Cerpa's wife were arrested together on a bus hours before an
                 11-hour siege of the safehouse, in which three rebels and one police officer died
                 and 14 guerrillas were captured.

                 Most Peruvians, who were caught in the cross fire of guerrilla violence during
                 the 1980s and early 1990s, are unsympathetic to Berenson. Many remember her
                 public pre-sentence declaration in January 1996, when she angrily screamed,
                 "There are no criminal terrorists in the MRTA. It is a revolutionary movement."

                   Copyright 2001 The Associated Press.