United States v. Ortiz-Colon

── United States v. Ortiz-Colon ── Court: Court of Appeals for the First Circuit Date: May 06, 2026 Category: General United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit No. 23-1504 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Appellee, v. FRANCISCO XAVIER ORTIZ-COLÓN, Defendant, Appellant. APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO [Hon. Raúl M. Arias-Marxuach, U.S. District Judge] Before Barron, Chief Judge, Thompson and Gelpí, Circuit Judges. Linda Backiel for appellant. Julia M. Meconiates, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom W. Stephen Muldrow, United States Attorney, and Mariana E. Bauzá-Almonte, Assistant United States Attorney, were on brief, for appellee. May 6, 2026  THOMPSON, Circuit Judge. On November 9, 2022, a jury for the United States District Court of Puerto Rico concluded its deliberations, re-entered the courtroom where it had spent the last six days, and returned nineteen guilty verdicts against appellant-defendant Francisco Xavier Ortiz-Colón ("Ortiz").1 Ortiz now appeals his convictions for producing, possessing, and receiving child pornography, and for coercing and enticing a minor, along with the substantive reasonableness of his 360-month sentence. Ortiz claims the district court committed a plethora of plain errors throughout his trial as follows: while empaneling the jury, excusing jurors during trial, allowing overview testimony from government witnesses, responding to juror notes, and allowing multiple convictions based on the same alleged conduct. And Ortiz claims that, after the jury returned its findings, the district court abused its discretion by not varying downward even more than it did when issuing his sentence. After careful scrutiny of the trial record and due consideration of the arguments presented, we affirm in part and remand for further proceedings. 1 AlthoughOrtiz's appellate briefing spells his name "Ortíz," his district court filings and the rules of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language (Real Academia de la Lengua Española) suggest Ortiz is correctly spelled without an accent. Therefore, we proceed without the accent. - 2 -  I. We begin with a brief rundown of the relevant facts as the jury might favorably have found them, supported by the appellate record. See United States v. Burgos-Montes, 786 F.3d 92, 99 (1st Cir. 2015); United States v. Bradshaw, 281 F.3d 278, 280 (1st Cir. 2002).2 As we present our exposition, we take a big-picture approach and leave more acute details for our forthcoming discussions of Ortiz's specific claims. A. In December 2019, a team from the Crimes Against Children Task Force (based within Homeland Security Investigations) launched an investigation after receiving a troubling complaint from a school social worker in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The social worker reported that an Instagram user under the account "axilas_promocion"3 had contacted a twelve-year-old student, KMC,4 initially requesting photos of her underarms and, later, requesting sexually explicit photos. Federal investigators interviewed KMC and learned that her classmate, SMG, received Because Ortiz challenges the substantive reasonableness of 2 his sentence, we will pull our background facts for that later discussion from the undisputed portions of the presentence investigatio