United States v. Dennis Martinez-Cacho

KETHLEDGE, Chief Judge. Dennis Martinez-Cacho pled guilty to illegal reentry in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1326. The district court imposed an above-guidelines sentence of 30 months, which Martinez-Cacho now challenges as substantively and procedurally unreasonable. We reject his arguments and affirm.

I.

In 2020, Martinez-Cacho, a Honduran citizen residing illegally in the United States, assaulted and strangled his common-law wife. The Houston, Texas, Police Department dispatched officers to the couple’s home. When the officers arrived, his wife said that Martinez-Cacho had brutally assaulted her for ten minutes. She also showed the officers photos from a prior assault by Martinez-Cacho, which depicted blood streaming from her nose and bottom lip and abrasions on her neck. The officers arrested Martinez-Cacho, who later pled guilty to the assault charge and received a two-year state prison sentence. Martinez-Cacho served that sentence and was deported in January 2022.

Three months later, however, Martinez-Cacho reentered the United States. Thereafter, police officers in Westlake, Ohio observed a vehicle with what appeared to be phony temporary registration tags. The officers approached the vehicle and found Martinez-Cacho inside. He told the officers that his name was “Dennis Martinez” and provided fake registration documents for the vehicle. The officers arrested Martinez-Cacho, and the U.S. Border Patrol took him into custody. A grand jury thereafter indicted Martinez-Cacho for illegal reentry in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1326; he pled guilty without a plea agreement.

A probation officer prepared a presentence report and recommended an eight-level enhancement for Martinez-Cacho’s prior assault conviction and a three-level reduction for acceptance of responsibility. That yielded a total offense level of 13 and a criminal history category of II. At sentencing, Martinez-Cacho had no objection to these calculations and agreed that his guidelines range was 15 to 21 months. The district court invited Martinez-Cacho to speak on his own behalf, which he briefly did. The court expressed concern that Martinez-Cacho planned to reenter the United States again after he served his sentence, and notified defense counsel that it would consider an upward variance. The court also discussed facts relevant to the 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) factors, including Martinez-Cacho’s childhood, his return to the U.S. soon after his deportation, his criminal history (including convictions and uncharged criminal conduct), and the need to deter yet another illegal reentry. The court sentenced Martinez-Cacho to 30 months’ imprisonment. This appeal followed.

II.

Martinez-Cacho argues that his sentence was both substantively and procedurally unreasonable. We review the substantive reasonableness of Martinez-Cacho’s sentence for an abuse of discretion. See United States v. Bistline, 720 F.3d 631, 633 (6th Cir. 2013). A sentence is substantively unreasonable if the district court gives an unreasonable amount of weight to any pertinent factor. See id.

Martinez-Cacho argues that the district court did that here when it varied upward based on his record of domestic assault. Specifically, he argues that his guidelines range already accounts for his domestic-assault conviction. The concern that the district court repeatedly cited, however, was that Martinez-Cacho had demonstrated a “pattern” of violent physical abuse of women. That pattern was indeed uncontested during Martinez-Cacho’s sentencing hearing: he never disputed that he had battered his wife (as shown in photos shown to the police) in Texas in an incident preceding the one leading to his domestic-assault conviction; nor did he ever dispute (as he easily could have if the court were mistaken) the district court’s inference that the woman protected (along with her two children) from Martinez-Cacho by a court order in New York was a different woman than the one he battered in Texas. These additional facts were not already accounted for by the guidelines’ treatment of Martinez-Cacho’s domestic-assault conviction alone. Thus, the district court did not abuse its discretion by considering this pattern of abuse when imposing its sentence. See United States v. Haile, 157 F.4th 820, 833 (6th Cir. 2025).

These same reasons likewise refute Martinez-Cacho’s argument that his sentence created an unwarranted disparity with the average sentence (12 months) in illegal-reentry cases. The district court itself acknowledged that disparity and explained that Martinez-Cacho’s case was not “mine run”—for reasons that included his pattern of battering women as well as his quick reentry to the United States after his earlier removal. See United States v. Mitchell, 107 F.4th 534, 545 (6th Cir. 2024).

Martinez-Cacho next argues that his use of the name “Dennis Martinez” was not deceptive (as the district court thought it was). But the fact remains that Martinez-Cacho used a different name than the one shown on his removal order, which could only make more difficult the task of connecting him to that order. One could thus infer that his omission of “Cacho” was not a coincidence. And meanwhile Martinez-Cacho undisputedly gave the police fake registration papers for his vehicle, which supports the court’s core finding of deception. We see no abuse of discretion on this point either.

Finally, Martinez-Cacho argues that the district court failed to provide him with a meaningful allocution during his sentencing hearing. He did not raise that same complaint in the district court, so we review only for plain error. See United States v. Richardson, 948 F.3d 733, 744 (6th Cir. 2020). There was none: the district court invited Martinez-Cacho to allocute, which Martinez-Cacho briefly did, ending with “That’s all.” The district court did not truncate Martinez- Cacho’s allocution; Martinez-Cacho himself did.

The district court’s judgment is affirmed.