Opinion ID: 4529971
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Gómez

Text: Gómez principally argues that the district court deprived him of his constitutional rights to present a defense and to a fair trial by refusing to allow the jury to consider voluminous Spanish-language documents related to his defense that he was too busy being a community leader to have the time to be a drug-conspiracy leader. The district court provisionally admitted the Spanish-language exhibits, delayed jury deliberations for nearly one week to allow for translation, and ultimately instructed the jury not to consider the untranslated documents. Gómez objected at trial, so the government urges us to apply the abuse-of-discretion standard. See United States v. Pires, 642 F.3d 1, 13 (1st Cir. 2011). Under any standard of review, the district court did not err when it complied with its statutory duty to refuse to allow the jury to consider untranslated documents. The Jones Act requires [a]ll pleadings and proceedings in the District of Puerto Rico to be conducted in the English language. 48 U.S.C. § 864. We have been clear that this is an independent duty of the district court grounded in a policy of integrating Puerto Rico with the rest of the United States and that this duty is too great to allow parties to convert [the district] court into a Spanish language court at their whim. United States v. Millán-Isaac, 749 F.3d 57, 63 (1st Cir. 2014) - 27 - (citation omitted). [T]he duty of the [district] court to ensure compliance with the Jones Act is not lessened in cases where counsel . . . encourages the district court to set aside the English-language requirement. Id. (citation omitted). Here, the district court, mindful of its duty, appropriately denied Gómez's request.5