United States v. Conill-Perez.
No. 25-6101. 10/13/2026. W.D.Okla. Judge Moritz. Possession of Fentanyl With Intent to Distribute—US Sentencing Guidelines—Stash-House Enhancement—Criminal History Points for Prior Conviction.
October 13, 2026
In 2024, Conill-Perez traveled from Florida to Oklahoma City, where he met a confidential source with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in a restaurant parking lot to distribute controlled substances. The confidential source gave DEA agents the goods received from Conill-Perez, which were four individually wrapped packages with 1,000 round blue pills marked “M-30” in each package. After Conill-Perez exited the confidential source’s vehicle, he entered a vehicle driven by E.B., and they drove to a Country Inn and Suites hotel. Conill-Perez later left the Country Inn and walked to a different hotel parking lot, where he entered a Nissan, exited moments later, and walked back toward the Country Inn. The Nissan left the parking lot and was stopped by a state narcotics agent, who learned that Conill-Perez gave the driver 1,000 M-30 pills. DEA agents learned that E.B. had rented a room in his name at the Country Inn, but hotel staff gave agents a piece of paper that had both Conill-Perez’s and E.B.’s names on it, along with room number 210. Agents then saw Conill-Perez entering the hotel lobby with a duffel bag, and the officers approached him. Conill-Perez ran from the hotel and tossed the duffel bag, but agents caught and arrested him and recovered the bag, which had packages of M-30 pills. Laboratory testing showed that these pills and the pills sold to the confidential source (but not the pills in the Nissan) contained a fentanyl analogue. Conill-Perez admitted to agents that he traveled to Oklahoma City to distribute drugs and that E.B. helped him rent the hotel room because he couldn’t rent the room himself. A DEA agent later testified that a search of room 210 turned up no evidence of drug trafficking. Conill-Perez pleaded guilty without a plea agreement to one count of possession of fentanyl with intent to distribute. His presentence investigation report (PSR) included a two-level enhancement under the US Sentencing Guidelines (USSG) for maintaining a stash house and calculated a criminal history score of seven, which included three points for his 46-month probation-revocation sentence from a 1996 Florida conviction. This resulted in a sentencing range of 235 to 293 months. Conill-Perez challenged the stash-house enhancement before and during his sentencing hearing. The district court overruled the objections but ultimately varied downward and sentenced Conill-Perez to 180 months’ imprisonment and five years of supervised release.
On appeal, Conill-Perez argued that the district court erred in applying the stash-house enhancement. The district court applied this enhancement based on facts from the PSR: Conill-Perez entered and left the hotel; he told agents he traveled to Oklahoma City to distribute pills and needed E.B.’s help with renting the room; and a hotel clerk produced a paper listing Conill-Perez’s and E.B.’s names with a room number. Conill-Perez contended that these facts do not show he “maintained” the hotel room or did so “‘for the purpose of’ distributing drugs” as required by USSG § 2D1.1(b)(12). Here, while Conill-Perez “possessed” the hotel room for several hours, he did not “maintain” it, as there was no evidence that he entered or exited the room during that short time, and officers found no evidence of drug-trafficking during the search of the room. The Tenth Circuit concluded that Conill-Perez’s brief possession of the hotel room, with little to no evidence of his control over the room, did not constitute “maintain[ing] a premises” under § 2D1.1(b)(12). Accordingly, the district court erred in applying the stash-house enhancement.
Conill-Perez also challenged the district court’s assessment of three criminal history points for his prior sentence arising from his 1996 conviction. He maintained that his original probationary sentence was not a “term of imprisonment,” so the district court could not add the revocation sentence to the probationary sentence, citing the definition of “sentence of imprisonment” as “a sentence of incarceration” in USSG § 4A1.2(b)(1). Conill-Perez further contended that lacking an initial carceral sentence, the court should look to the date of his original probationary sentence when determining whether that sentence is within the 15-year lookback period. Section § 4A1.1(a) instructs district courts to add three points to a defendant’s criminal-history score “for each prior sentence of imprisonment exceeding one year and one month.” But prior sentences imposed more than 15 years before the defendant’s instant offense do not warrant the increase, unless the defendant’s incarceration extended into this 15-year period. When, as here, a prior imprisonment sentence results from a probation revocation, the USSG direct courts to aggregate the original sentence and the probation revocation sentence under § 4A1.2(k)(1). Section 4A1.2(k)(2) also instructs that when the combined sentence is “an adult term of imprisonment totaling more than one year and one month,” the question for the lookback period is “the date of last release from incarceration” on the combined sentence. Here, under § 4A1.2(k)(1), the district court correctly added Conill-Perez’s 46-month revocation sentence to his original term of imprisonment, treated as zero years because it was a probation sentence. And the combined sentence falls within the lookback period because Conill-Perez’s date of last release from incarceration on the sentence—in or after 2014—was within the lookback period, which goes back to September 2009. Accordingly, Conill-Perez did not establish a plain error in the calculation of his criminal history score.
The sentence was affirmed in part and reversed in part, and the case was remanded for resentencing.