United States Court of Appeals

For the First Circuit

No. 19-1936

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Appellee,

v.

DENNIS AYALA,

Defendant, Appellant.

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

FOR THE DISTRICT OF MAINE

[Hon. George Z. Singal, U.S. District Judge]

Before

Kayatta, Selya, and Barron,

Circuit Judges. 

Jane Elizabeth Lee for appellant Dennis Ayala. 

Noah Falk, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Halsey 

B. Frank, United States Attorney, was on brief, for appellee. 

March 19, 2021
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BARRON, Circuit Judge. Dennis Ayala challenges his 2019 

sentence in the District of Maine for a federal drug conspiracy 

offense. We affirm.

I.

On February 25, 2019, pursuant to a plea agreement, Ayala 

pleaded guilty in the District of Maine to one count of conspiracy 

to distribute, and to possess with intent to distribute, 40 grams 

or more of fentanyl, in violation of 21 U.S.C. §§ 846, 841(a)(1), 

and 841(b)(1)(B). Under the plea agreement, Ayala and the 

government had agreed that, for purposes of calculating the 

Guidelines Sentencing Range ("GSR") for this offense, they would 

both recommend a Base Offense Level ("BOL") under the Guidelines 

of 28, pursuant to U.S.S.G. § 2D1.1(a)(5) and (c)(6). That BOL 

corresponds to the one that applies when the quantity of fentanyl 

attributable to a defendant convicted of an offense such as the 

one to which Ayala pleaded guilty is 280 to 400 grams. See id.

§ 2D1.1(a)(5), (c)(6). 

The first day of Ayala's sentencing proceeding was July 

16, 2019. The District Court indicated at that time that it did 

not intend to rely on the BOL in the plea agreement. Instead, the 

District Court explained that it intended to rely on the BOL in 

the Presentence Investigation Report ("PSR"), which the United 

States Probation Office had prepared in advance of the sentencing 

proceeding. 
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The PSR had attributed a quantity of nearly 900 grams of 

fentanyl to Ayala in connection with his offense.1 Pursuant to 

U.S.S.G. § 2D1.1(a)(5) and (c)(5), the PSR had thus calculated 

Ayala's BOL to be 30 rather than 28 as the plea agreement had 

specified. The PSR had then added a three-level leadership 

enhancement based on U.S.S.G. § 3B1.1(b) and subtracted three 

levels pursuant to U.S.S.G. § 3E1.1(a) and (b) for Ayala's 

acceptance of responsibility. The result was that the PSR had 

calculated Ayala's Total Offense Level ("TOL") to be 30. The PSR 

had then calculated the GSR, based on that TOL and Ayala's criminal 

history, to be 108 to 135 months of imprisonment. 

Both Ayala and the government objected to the District 

Court's decision to adopt the BOL set forth in the PSR. When asked 

by the District Court to explain the objection, the government 

said that both sides had agreed in the plea agreement to make a 

nonbinding recommendation to the District Court that the BOL be 

28. Ayala also argued that the drug quantity that the PSR had 

used in calculating the BOL was too large.

The PSR had based the drug quantity on which it relied 

in calculating Ayala's BOL on certain cash that Ayala had 

1 The PSR had based its more detailed calculation of the drug 

quantity on converted heroin drug weights and their marijuana 

equivalents of just over 1,100 kilograms. But, the PSR had also 

noted that if only fentanyl had been used to make the calculation, 

then the total drug quantity would have been 897.07 grams, which 

is an amount that would also have corresponded to a BOL of 30. 
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possessed. The PSR had found that the cash had been used in 

connection with the conspiracy to which Ayala had pleaded guilty. 

Ayala contended, however, that the cash at issue was not in fact 

"drug money" and so should not have been used to determine that 

the drug quantity involved in his crime was large enough to yield 

a BOL of 30. 

Ayala pointed to documents that he had previously 

submitted to the District Court. Those documents, he argued, 

showed that he had used some of the cash in question to repay a 

person who had paid his bail for his arrest on a state drug charge. 

Ayala also contended that he had received the cash in 2013 from 

legitimate sources. 

The District Court granted Ayala a continuance to 

support this latter contention with additional documentation. By 

the time the sentencing proceeding recommenced on September 16, 

2019, Ayala had produced documents that showed, among other things, 

that he had received benefits and life insurance payments of 

approximately $250,000 in 2013, following his daughter's death. 

The District Court nonetheless adopted the PSR's 

calculation of Ayala's GSR, which was based on a BOL of 30 rather 

than 28. That BOL was in turn based on the drug quantity of nearly 

900 grams of fentanyl that the District Court had attributed to 

Ayala in connection with his offense. The District Court then 

sentenced Ayala to 108 months in prison. The length of that prison 
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sentence was at the very bottom of the GSR of 108 to 135 months 

that the District Court used. It was also at the very bottom of 

the GSR that the PSR had used. If the District Court had calculated 

the GSR based on the plea agreement's BOL of 28, then -- holding 

all other aspects of the calculation constant -- the GSR would 

have been 87 to 108 months. See U.S.S.G. § 2D1.1(a)(5), (c)(6). 

In that event, the sentence that the District Court imposed would 

have been at the very top end of the applicable GSR. 

Ayala timely appealed. 

II.

Ayala first takes aim at the procedural reasonableness 

of his sentence due to the drug quantity that the District Court 

attributed to him in connection with his offense. The District 

Court relied on that drug quantity in calculating the GSR to be 

108 to 135 months of imprisonment. Ayala contends that the 

evidence did not suffice to support that drug quantity, because 

the District Court based it in part on his having been in 

possession of cash that was "drug money" when the record failed to 

show that it was. Ayala also contends that, in any event, the 

District Court erred by simply relying on the PSR's use of that 

larger drug quantity to calculate his GSR without making 

independent findings of its own. Ayala contends that this was so 

because he had expressly objected to the PSR's use of that larger 

drug quantity in calculating his BOL on the ground that, in doing 
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so, it was wrongly treating the cash that he had possessed as "drug 

money." 

We review for clear error a contention that the record 

does not support a district court's factfinding regarding drug 

quantity. See United States v. Bernier, 660 F.3d 543, 545 (1st 

Cir. 2011). We review de novo a contention that a district court 

erred in failing to make independent findings of its own and by 

instead simply adopting the PSR's findings in the face of a 

defendant's express objection to them. See United States v. 

Murchison, 865 F.3d 23, 26 (1st Cir. 2017). But, here, we may 

bypass the substance of each of these contentions, because, as we 

will explain, any error that the District Court may have made with 

respect to drug quantity in calculating the GSR in Ayala's case 

was harmless. See United States v. Tavares, 705 F.3d 4, 24-28

(1st Cir. 2013).

In announcing Ayala's sentence, the District Court noted 

that Ayala was a long-term drug dealer and that he continued to 

traffic drugs after his arrests, even while out on bail. It then 

explained:

[I]n my findings [Ayala] has . . . a [TOL of] 

30 and a Criminal History Category II which is 

108 to 135 months. If he had [a TOL of] 

28 . . . , as [Ayala's counsel] was arguing, 

and a II, he would have 87 to 108 months. 

In my view, the 108 months is appropriate 

under either set of circumstances, and that's 

what I'm going to sentence him to. (emphasis 

added). 
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The District Court's statement that the sentence that it 

imposed was "appropriate under either set of circumstances" 

clearly demonstrates, when read in the context of "the record as 

a whole," Williams v. United States, 503 U.S. 193, 203 (1992), 

that the sentence did not depend on whether the BOL was 28 or 30. 

That conclusion accords with the fact that the sentence that the 

District Court imposed falls within the GSR that corresponds to 

either of those BOLs. And, because the statement by the District 

Court makes clear that the sentence that it imposed did not depend 

on its choice between those two BOLs, its statement also 

necessarily demonstrates that the sentence that it imposed did not 

depend on whether the proper drug quantity was the lesser one that 

Ayala contends the District Court should have used or the larger 

one that it did use. Accordingly, the record reveals that any 

error that the District Court may have made with respect to drug 

quantity was harmless, because any such error had no effect on the 

sentence imposed. See Tavares, 705 F.3d at 24-28; see also United 

States v. Marchena-Silvestre, 802 F.3d 196, 201-02 (1st Cir. 2015) 

(explaining that "not . . . every error in calculating the [GSR] 

calls for reversal under plain error analysis, or even under 

harmless error analysis" because "[a] sentencing court might, for 

example, make it clear that it was aware of a possible flaw in its 

calculation of a [GSR], and explain that its sentence would 

nevertheless be the same under an alternative analysis pressed by 
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the party that ultimately appealed," but finding plain error 

because "[n]othing in th[e] record provide[d] any indication clear 

enough to overbear the probative force of th[e] logical 

presumption" that "there [wa]s at least a reasonable likelihood 

that [the sentencing court] would have landed on a [shorter] 

sentence").2

In contending otherwise, Ayala points first to MolinaMartinez v. United States, 136 S. Ct. 1338 (2016), in which the 

United States Supreme Court explained that Guidelines calculation 

errors can be prejudicial even when they are not preserved and 

even when the imposed sentence would have fallen within the correct 

GSR. See 136 S. Ct. at 1345. But, the Supreme Court also noted 

in that case that there might be "instances when, despite 

application of an erroneous Guidelines range, . . . [t]he record 

in a case may show . . . that the district court thought the 

sentence it chose was appropriate irrespective of the Guidelines 

2 Ayala contends at one point in his briefing to us that the 

District Court "substantively erred" in using the higher BOL from 

the PSR, but he does not dispute that such a challenge, even if 

styled as one that takes aim at a "substantive" rather than a 

"procedural" error, fails insofar as the resultant BOL of 30 played 

no role in the District Court's decision to impose the sentence 

that he challenges. Nor is there merit to Ayala's challenge to 

his sentence insofar as he means to take issue with the length of 

the sentence independent of his challenge to the District Court's 

reliance on the drug quantity set forth in the PSR and thus to the 

BOL of 30. As we have noted, under either the higher BOL of 30 or 

the lower one of 28, the sentence was within the applicable GSR, 

and we see no basis for concluding on this record that, as such, 

the sentence that was imposed was substantively unreasonable.
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range" and that in such cases the defendant would not be able to 

show that the calculation error was prejudicial. Id. at 1346. 

For the reasons that we have just given, the District Court here 

made clear that it "thought the sentence it chose was appropriate 

irrespective" of the dispute over the proper GSR, id., and so 

Molina-Martinez provides no support for Ayala's position. 

Ayala also relies on United States v. Alphas, 785 F.3d 

775 (1st Cir. 2015), in which the district court stated that it 

was "unlikely" that a different Guidelines calculation would have 

resulted in a different sentence, id. at 780. We concluded that 

this statement in context left open "the possibility of a lesser 

sentence," such that the error in the Guidelines calculation was 

not harmless. Id. But, Ayala's reliance on this precedent, too, 

is misplaced, because, as we have explained, the District Court's 

explanation for the sentence that it imposed does not admit of 

such a possibility.

III.

Ayala's remaining ground for challenging his sentence is 

that the sentencing judge exhibited bias toward him at his 

sentencing proceeding. Because Ayala did not preserve this 

challenge below, we review it only for plain error, see United 

States v. Caramadre, 807 F.3d 359, 374 (1st Cir. 2015), and we 

find none. 
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Ayala's sentencing proceeding began with three witnesses 

speaking on Ayala's behalf. The first was Ayala's fiancée, who 

stated at the start of her testimony at the proceeding that she 

was nervous and that she did not know what to say. The sentencing 

judge at that point stated: "You want to tell me he is a swell 

guy." 

Ayala contends that this one statement by the sentencing 

judge demonstrates bias toward him and thus that his sentence 

cannot stand. But, read in the context of the transcript of the 

sentencing proceeding as a whole, see United States v. LanzaVázquez, 799 F.3d 134, 143 (1st Cir. 2015), the statement at most 

reflects a perhaps ill-advised attempt by the sentencing judge to 

put a witness at ease. Indeed, at the same sentencing proceeding 

and over the government's objection, the District Court granted 

Ayala's request for a continuance of several weeks so that he would 

have an additional opportunity to rebut the challenged findings 

regarding drug quantity. Thus, Ayala has failed to show judicial 

bias, see Liteky v. United States, 510 U.S. 540, 555-56 (1994), 

let alone met his burden to show a "clear or obvious" instance of 

it, as is required by the plain error standard, United States v. 

Duarte, 246 F.3d 56, 60 (1st Cir. 2001).

IV.

For these reasons, we affirm.