UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Appellee,

v.

PEDRO A. MARTÍNEZ-MERCADO,

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

Montecalvo, Thompson, and Aframe, Circuit Judges.

José B. Vélez Goveo, with whom Vélez & Vélez Law Office was on brief, for appellant. Thomas F. Klumper, Assistant United States Attorney, Senior Appellate Counsel, with whom W. Stephen Muldrow, United States Attorney, and Mariana E. Bauzá-Almonte, Assistant United States Attorney, Chief, Appellate Division, were on brief, for appellee.

March 19, 2025 AFRAME, Circuit Judge. After serving as postmaster of the Sabana Grande Post Office, Pedro Martínez-Mercado ("Martínez") moved from Puerto Rico to New Jersey with a postal remittance bag containing over $11,000 in cash and money orders. For this conduct, a jury in the District of Puerto Rico convicted him of misappropriating postal funds and stealing or converting government property, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1711 and 641, respectively. The district court sentenced Martínez to six months in prison.

On appeal, Martínez argues that the district court should have permitted him to admit certain evidence showing that he intended to return the funds; the court gave an erroneous supplemental jury instruction; the prosecutor offered improper remarks in her rebuttal argument; and the evidence failed to support his convictions. Because Martínez's arguments are waived or fail under the applicable standard of review, we affirm the judgment.

I.

We begin by rehearsing the background facts relevant to the sufficiency challenge in the light most favorable to the jury verdict, and the facts relevant to the remaining challenges "in a 'balanced' manner." See United States v. Lanza-Vázquez, 799 F.3d 134, 138 n.1 (1st Cir. 2015) (quoting United States v. Burgos-Montes, 786 F.3d 92, 99 (1st Cir. 2015)).

- 2 - Martínez worked for twenty-one years as a United States Postal Service employee. For five of those years, from 2012 until November 2017, Martínez served as the postmaster of the Postal Service branch located in Sabana Grande, Puerto Rico (the "SGPO"). In November 2017, Martínez left Puerto Rico to become a Network Transportation Manager in Kearney, New Jersey, where he remained until he retired from the Postal Service in 2019.

As the SGPO postmaster, Martínez managed all aspects of the branch's finances. For example, he oversaw the daily reconciliation of customer transactions involving cash and money orders and prepared corresponding bank deposits, referred to as "remittances," in accord with standardized Postal Service procedures.

The Postal Service procedures dictate that, at the close of business each day, the postal employee responsible for preparing the daily remittance receives a computer-generated report itemizing all money orders and cash collected from customers that day, as well as reconciliations from each window clerk with a tally of their cash-based transactions. The preparer reviews and consolidates this information onto a final remittance form detailing that post office's totals for that day's cash and money order sales, which is transmitted to the Postal Service's finance department. The cash and money orders are then p