United States v. Maldonado

── United States v. Maldonado ── Court: Court of Appeals for the First Circuit Date: June 02, 2026 Category: General United States Court of Appeals For the First Circuit No. 24-2088 UNITED STATES, Appellee, v. JESUS MALDONADO, a/k/a Juan Moreno, a/k/a William Hernandez, a/k/a Jesus Hernandez, a/k/a William Melendez, Defendant, Appellant. APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF RHODE ISLAND [Hon. John J. McConnell, Jr., U.S. District Judge] Before Montecalvo, Lynch, and Dunlap, Circuit Judges. Noreen McCarthy and The McCarthy Law Firm for appellant. Lauren S. Zurier, Assistant U.S. Attorney, with whom Sara Miron Bloom, Acting U.S. Attorney, was on brief, for appellee. June 2, 2026  LYNCH, Circuit Judge. Jesus Maldonado appeals from his conviction after his unconditional guilty plea and his sentence. He pled guilty to three counts charged in his superseding indictment: attempting to entice a minor to engage in illicit sexual activity, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2422(b); attempting to transfer obscene material to a minor, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1470; and committing these offenses while a registered sex offender, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2260A. The U.S. District Court imposed a sentence of 447 months' imprisonment, within Maldonado's Guidelines Sentencing Range ("GSR"), but also the maximum sentence within that GSR. Maldonado brings three arguments on appeal: (1) that he was denied his Fifth Amendment right of due process based on alleged prosecutorial misconduct in the grand jury proceedings; (2) that he was denied his Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel; and (3) that his sentence is procedurally and substantively unreasonable. We reject all three. Maldonado's guilty plea has waived his attack on the grand jury proceedings. His ineffective assistance of counsel claim cannot be heard on direct appeal and so is dismissed without prejudice. And Maldonado has waived his procedural reasonableness challenges to his sentence, so the only issue properly before us is the substantive reasonableness of his sentence. We uphold his sentence as substantively reasonable. - 2 -  I. As "this appeal follows a conviction via [the defendant's] guilty plea, we draw the facts from the plea colloquy and sentencing materials." United States v. Vélez-Luciano, 814 F.3d 553, 556 (1st Cir. 2016) (citing United States v. Whitlow, 714 F.3d 41, 42 (1st Cir. 2013)). In March 2019, Rhode Island State Police Detective Adam Houston conducted an online child exploitation sting investigation on the mobile social network site MocoSpace. Houston, who was a member of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, posed as "Jenni," a fictional resident of Warwick, Rhode Island, whose MocoSpace profile indicated she was 19 years old1 and featured a profile picture of a female law enforcement officer age-regressed to appear to be a juvenile. On March 13, 2019, Maldonado, who was 55 years old, sent a friend request to "Jenni" and initiated contact with a message complimenting her profile picture. Houston accepted Maldonado's friend request, Maldonado provided a phone number, and Houston began texting Maldonado as "Jenni." Over a two-day period, Maldonado and "Jenni" exchanged 714 text messages. Within 23 minutes of beginning to text with Maldonado, Houston informed Maldonado that "Jenni" was 13 years old. In reply, 1 In the criminal complaint filed by