Federal Criminal Defense in the District of Puerto Rico

By Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., and Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA

The United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico runs the largest federal criminal docket in the First Circuit — 1,120 people sentenced in fiscal year 2024, more than the circuit’s four New England districts combined. It is also one of the most distinctive courts in the country: by statute, every pleading and proceeding is conducted in English while life outside the courthouse moves in Spanish, and the docket is dominated by drug-trafficking and firearms prosecutions on a scale few mainland districts ever see. Facing a federal charge here means entering that system, and the system rewards counsel who know it cold.

This guide walks through the district’s two courthouses and its bench, the English-language rule and what it means in practice, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and its enforcement machinery, and how we defend clients here through pro hac vice admission as part of a nationwide federal practice. Elizabeth Franklin-Best brings to that work a Best Lawyers in America 2026 “Best Lawyer” recognition in Appellate Practice together with a Chambers USA 2026 ranking for Litigation: White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations. Her record runs deep where this district’s cases land hardest: she has handled over 100 federal appeals and a sustained post-conviction docket within a practice spanning more than 330 federal matters across all twelve circuits and the U.S. Supreme Court — exactly the appellate and § 2255 firepower that long mandatory-minimum drug and firearms sentences out of San Juan demand. This page is part of our federal courts directory.

If you or a family member is facing federal charges in San Juan — or anywhere on the island — our paid, one-hour initial consultation will lay out the case’s posture and the realistic options, in plain terms.

Quick Answer: District of Puerto Rico

Question	Answer
What court handles federal cases in Puerto Rico?	The U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, sitting at the Clemente Ruiz Nazario U.S. Courthouse in Hato Rey and the José V. Toledo U.S. Courthouse in Old San Juan.
Who prosecutes federal cases there?	The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico — led as of mid-2026 by U.S. Attorney W. Stephen Muldrow, from Torre Chardón in San Juan.
Which circuit hears appeals?	The First Circuit, headquartered in Boston — which also holds regular sittings in San Juan — covering Puerto Rico, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.
Where are post-conviction motions filed?	In San Juan — Section 2255 and compassionate-release motions attacking a Puerto Rico federal judgment are filed and decided in the District of Puerto Rico.
Can the firm appear in the District of Puerto Rico?	Yes. We appear in the District of Puerto Rico through pro hac vice admission — and because the court’s proceedings are in English by statute, a mainland federal practice translates directly.

Key Takeaways

• The District of Puerto Rico sentenced 1,120 people in fiscal year 2024 — the largest federal criminal docket in the First Circuit, bigger than its four New England sister districts combined (USSC data).
• Drug trafficking accounted for 58.3% of those sentencings — roughly double the national share — with firearms (9.1%) and fraud (9.2%) next.
• By federal statute, 48 U.S.C. § 864, all pleadings and proceedings in this court are conducted in English, even though daily life in Puerto Rico is largely lived in Spanish.
• The court sits at the Clemente Ruiz Nazario U.S. Courthouse in Hato Rey and the José V. Toledo U.S. Courthouse in Old San Juan; as of mid-2026 it is led by Chief Judge Raúl M. Arias-Marxuach.
• Puerto Rico carries seven authorized district judgeships under 28 U.S.C. § 133 — the second-largest bench in the First Circuit, behind only Massachusetts.
• The U.S. Attorney’s Office under W. Stephen Muldrow announces task-force indictments, pleas, and sentencings in weekly batches — a charging tempo with real consequences for defendants.
• Appeals go to the First Circuit, which sits in Boston and also hears argument in San Juan; the notice of appeal is generally due within 14 days.
• Section 2255 and compassionate-release motions return to this district — and First Circuit courts granted 25.0% of compassionate-release motions decided in FY2025, well above the 14.1% national rate.
• We appear here pro hac vice; because the court works in English under § 864, a nationwide federal practice carries over without friction.

The District of Puerto Rico at a Glance

The United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico is the federal trial court for the entire island, and it works from two San Juan courthouses: the Clemente Ruiz Nazario U.S. Courthouse at 150 Carlos Chardón Street in Hato Rey — which shares its campus with the Federico Degetau Federal Building — and the José V. Toledo U.S. Courthouse in Old San Juan. A criminal case from Ponce, Mayagüez, or Aguadilla is prosecuted in San Juan all the same; this is one district, and its center of gravity is the capital.

The district belongs to the First Circuit — an accident of history that pairs the Caribbean’s busiest federal docket with the courts of New England, including the District of Massachusetts and the District of Rhode Island. The pairing has a practical upside: the First Circuit does not make Puerto Rico come to it, holding regular sittings in San Juan in addition to its Boston calendar.

Language is the district’s defining structural feature, and it is statutory, not customary: under 48 U.S.C. § 864, “all pleadings and proceedings in the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico shall be conducted in the English language.” In practice that means Spanish-language documents must come into the record through certified English translations, witnesses who testify in Spanish are heard through interpreters, and the court operates in English from arraignment to sentencing. For defendants and families who live in Spanish, that gap is real — and bridging it carefully is part of the defense lawyer’s job.

The Bench: Seven Judgeships for the Circuit’s Biggest Docket

Puerto Rico carries seven authorized district judgeships under 28 U.S.C. § 133 — the second-largest allotment in the First Circuit — and as of mid-2026 the court is led by Chief Judge Raúl M. Arias-Marxuach, with chambers split between the Hato Rey and Old San Juan courthouses and senior judges continuing to carry criminal caseloads. Even at that strength, the arithmetic is demanding: over a thousand sentencings a year works out to well over a hundred per active judgeship, a per-judge criminal volume few mainland courts approach.

That volume shapes daily practice. Magistrate judges run a high-throughput front end of initial appearances, detention hearings, and pretrial management — and the court had an open U.S. magistrate-judge appointment process underway in 2026, a reflection of the docket’s relentless demands. Multi-defendant indictments are routine, and scheduling discipline matters: deadlines in this district are tools the court uses to keep an enormous docket moving.

For a defendant, the lesson is the same one the numbers teach everywhere, amplified: in a court processing cases at this scale, the defense lawyer’s most important job is to make this case stop looking routine — to surface the suppression issue, the role distinction, the mitigation story that pulls one client’s file out of the current.

Federal Criminal Cases in the District

This docket has a profile unlike any other in the circuit: drug-trafficking conspiracies — many tied to the Caribbean’s maritime and air smuggling corridors — make up the clear majority of cases, firearms charges under 18 U.S.C. §§ 922(g) and 924(c) run alongside them, and fraud and white-collar prosecutions, including healthcare-fraud enforcement, form a substantial third lane. Procedurally, every one of them moves through the same federal sequence.

Most cases begin with an investigation by a federal agency, sometimes signaled by a target letter or a grand jury subpoena. Formal charges follow, typically by indictment. After an initial appearance and arraignment, the case proceeds through pretrial litigation and discovery, and is then resolved either by a negotiated plea agreement or by trial. A conviction is followed by sentencing under the federal framework. Our federal criminal process hub walks through each stage in detail.

Defending within that sequence here means certain recurring battles: detention (fought hard in a district where multi-defendant conspiracy charges are the norm), the scope and quantity attributed to each individual in a sprawling indictment, the suppression questions raised by maritime interdictions and task-force operations, and the § 924(c) stacking and mandatory-minimum exposure that can dwarf the Guidelines range itself. Each is winnable — and each is lost by default when no one fights it.

Applied Insight: In a district that indicts in batches — the U.S. Attorney’s Office announces task-force indictments, pleas, and sentencings week after week — an individual defendant’s greatest risk is becoming a line item. The government’s institutional momentum here is enormous, and it favors fast, uniform outcomes. The counterweight is counsel who slows the case down to its facts: this client, this role, this evidence. That is the entire defense project in the District of Puerto Rico, and it begins the day you retain counsel, not the day of the plea hearing.

What Federal Prosecutors Pursue in Puerto Rico

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Puerto Rico — led as of mid-2026 by U.S. Attorney W. Stephen Muldrow, from Torre Chardón on Carlos Chardón Street — prosecutes at a tempo that has no real parallel in the circuit. Its press office publishes recurring roundups of Homeland Security Task Force indictments, guilty pleas, and sentencings, and its recent docket spans drug-and-firearms indictments from across the island, child-exploitation sentencings, fentanyl-tampering charges against a healthcare worker, and multimillion-dollar Medicare and Medicaid fraud recoveries from Puerto Rico pharmacies.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s fiscal year 2024 packet quantifies the docket: 1,120 people sentenced — the most in the First Circuit by a factor of two — with drug trafficking at 58.3% (nearly double the 29.5% national share), fraud, theft, and embezzlement at 9.2%, firearms at 9.1%, and a federal violent-crime component, including robbery (3.3%) and murder (1.6%), that mainland districts rarely see at this proportion. Guilty pleas resolved 98.5% of those cases; 17 went to trial.

One legal point deserves emphasis because it is so often misunderstood: federal criminal law applies in Puerto Rico of its own force, exactly as it does in the fifty states. The federal drug statutes, the firearms mandatory minimums, the Sentencing Guidelines, the Bail Reform Act — all of it operates here at full strength, whatever differences exist between Commonwealth law and state law on other questions. A defendant in this district is litigating against the same United States Code as a defendant in Boston or Miami, and the defenses that work are the same federal defenses.

For families navigating this system, the language reality compounds the stress: the prosecution unfolds in English under 48 U.S.C. § 864 while much of the evidence — recordings, messages, witness statements — originates in Spanish. Translation disputes are not clerical details in this district; what a wiretapped sentence actually meant can be the difference between a role enhancement and a role reduction, and we treat the translated record as contested territory.

Appeals and Post-Conviction Matters

Judgments from this district are reviewed by the First Circuit, and Puerto Rico appeals are a substantial share of that court’s criminal work — sentencing challenges above all, given the mandatory minimums and Guidelines disputes that drive this docket. The notice of appeal is generally due within fourteen days of the entry of judgment, and the circuit’s San Juan sittings mean argument may happen on the island itself.

After direct review, the collateral phase comes back to San Juan: a motion under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 attacking a Puerto Rico federal conviction is filed in this district, and so are compassionate-release motions under § 3582(c)(1)(A) and the other tools of federal post-conviction relief. The legal landscape shifted in May 2026, when the Supreme Court’s Rutherford decision barred compassionate-release motions built on nonretroactive changes in sentencing law — a route the First Circuit had recognized — but medical, age-based, and family-circumstance motions continue, and this circuit granted 25.0% of the compassionate-release motions it decided in fiscal year 2025, far above the 14.1% national rate. Within this district the FY2025 sample was small — nine such motions were decided — but every one of the nine was granted, a result that says less about any individual case’s odds than about how a well-supported motion can land here. For the many Puerto Rico defendants serving long mandatory-minimum drug and firearms sentences, post-conviction analysis is not an afterthought; it is often where the remaining leverage lives.

How the Firm Practices in This Court

We take District of Puerto Rico cases through pro hac vice admission, the case-by-case mechanism every federal district court provides for qualified outside counsel. The English-language statute makes this district unusually well suited to it: because § 864 requires the entire proceeding to run in English, a mainland federal practice steps into a San Juan courtroom working in the language the case is already required to speak.

The substantive battles in a Puerto Rico federal case are battles we fight everywhere: drug-quantity and conspiracy-scope litigation, § 924(c) and felon-in-possession exposure, safety-valve and mitigating-role arguments, healthcare-fraud loss calculations. The statutes and Guidelines are identical from San Juan to Seattle. What is local is texture — the court’s scheduling discipline, the task-force investigative patterns, the translated-evidence disputes — and we prepare for that texture deliberately, working with island-based resources whenever the case calls for them.

Elizabeth Franklin-Best is admitted to the First Circuit — the court that reviews every judgment from this district, in Boston or at its San Juan sittings — as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, and she wrote Reversing Your Criminal Conviction about the post-conviction stage where so many Puerto Rico sentences are ultimately contested. She maintains a genuinely national federal practice, admitted and appearing pro hac vice in courts from Montana to Florida and recognized in 2026 by both Chambers USA and Best Lawyers in America — so a San Juan defendant is represented by counsel who litigates these same federal questions across the country, not by a lawyer working a single local docket. From first appearance in Hato Rey through a § 2255 motion years later, the representation is built as one continuous arc.

Frequently Asked Questions

Talk With a Federal Criminal Defense Lawyer

An indictment out of Hato Rey, a detention hearing days away, a mandatory minimum that seems to leave no room, a sentence that deserves First Circuit review or a § 2255 challenge — every one of these has more moving parts than it first appears, and the analysis should start now. Our paid, one-hour initial consultation is where we do that analysis with you, candidly and in plain language.