[DO NOT PUBLISH]

In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Eleventh Circuit

____________________

No. 22-10904

Non-Argument Calendar

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

Plaintiff-Appellee,

versus

JAREECE EDWARD BLACKMON, 

Defendant-Appellant.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Middle District of Alabama

D.C. Docket No. 1:19-cr-00230-ECM-SRW-1

____________________

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2 Opinion of the Court 22-10904

Before JORDAN, BRANCH, and GRANT, Circuit Judges.

PER CURIAM:

Jareece Blackmon challenges his conviction and sentence for 

various federal drug- and gun-related crimes, including murder. 

He claims that the evidence presented to the jury was not 

sufficient, that one of his counts should have been tried separately, 

and that his 480-month sentence is substantively unreasonable. 

After careful review of the record, we affirm.

I.

On August 15, 2017, a late-night drug deal went awry. Carl 

Sewell and a few others had traveled to a residence in Enterprise, 

Alabama to sell a large quantity of marijuana to Jareece Blackmon. 

Only Sewell went inside the house, where he was shot. He was

later pronounced dead at the hospital. The next day, law 

enforcement arrested Blackmon at a house listed as his residence, 

where they recovered eighteen pounds of marijuana and three 

firearms, including the weapon used to shoot Sewell. 

A federal grand jury charged Blackmon with seven 

violations of federal law. Counts 1 and 5 were for conspiracy to 

distribute marijuana and possession with intent to distribute. See

21 U.S.C. §§ 841(a)(1), 846. Counts 2 and 4 were for possessing

various firearms as a felon and Count 6 for using or carrying a 

firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime. See 18 U.S.C. 

§§ 922(g)(1), 924(c)(1)(A). And Count 3 was for using a firearm to 

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22-10904 Opinion of the Court 3

commit murder in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime. See 18 

U.S.C. § 924(c), (j)(1). 

Count 7 also charged Blackmon with possession of a firearm 

as a felon, but it arose from an incident one month earlier. Before 

trial, Blackmon moved to sever this count from his upcoming trial. 

See Fed. R. Crim. P. 14. The court denied the motion, deciding that 

Blackmon had not shown the necessary prejudice to warrant 

severance. But the court did take care to instruct the jury to 

consider each crime and its evidence separately, emphasizing that 

if the jury found Blackmon “guilty or not guilty of one crime, that 

must not affect your verdict for any other crime.” 

After a trial, the jury found Blackmon guilty on all seven 

counts. The court sentenced him to a total of 480 months of 

imprisonment and three years of supervised release. His sentence 

included 60 months for each of Counts 1 and 5, 120 months for 

each of Counts 2, 4, and 7, and 420 months for Count 3. These 

terms run concurrently. His sentence also included 60 months for 

Count 6 to be served consecutively, resulting in the 480-month 

total. 

Now on appeal, Blackmon makes three claims. First, he

claims that the government did not present sufficient evidence to 

the jury for Counts 1–6, so the court should have granted his earlier 

motion for acquittal. Second, he argues that the court erred when 

it denied his motion to sever Count 7. Third, he submits that his 

480-month sentence is unreasonably high. 

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II.

We review challenges to the sufficiency of evidence de 

novo, but we view all “the evidence in the light most favorable to 

the government” and draw “all reasonable inferences and 

credibility choices in favor of the jury’s verdict.” United States v. 

Trujillo, 146 F.3d 838, 845 (11th Cir. 1998). With this lens, we ask 

whether “any rational trier of fact could have found the essential 

elements of the crime beyond reasonable doubt.” Id. (quotation 

omitted).

We review the district court’s decision to deny a motion to 

sever under Rule 14 for abuse of discretion. United States v. Hersh, 

297 F.3d 1233, 1241 (11th Cir. 2002). That same standard applies to 

the substantive reasonableness of a sentence. United States v. 

Overstreet, 713 F.3d 627, 636 (11th Cir. 2013).

III.

The government presented sufficient evidence for the jury 

to convict Blackmon on Counts 1–6.1 

We begin with Counts 1 and 5, the drug trafficking counts. 

Blackmon makes three non-conclusory arguments about the drug 

trafficking evidence. He claims that no reasonable jury could have 

believed the testimony of Cedric Moultrie, that the government 

1 Blackmon also references Count 7 in this part of his brief, but he never 

addresses relevant evidence and only requests dismissal of Counts 1–6. So he 

has forfeited any argument about the sufficiency of the evidence for Count 7. 

See Sapuppo v. Allstate Floridian Ins. Co., 739 F.3d 678, 681–82 (11th Cir. 2014).

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presented no evidence that Blackmon knew about the marijuana

recovered at his arrest, and that no evidence showed that he 

intended to distribute. As for Moultrie, Blackmon does not explain 

why the jury should not have trusted him, and, without anything 

more, we “are bound by the jury’s credibility choices.” United 

States v. Broughton, 689 F.3d 1260, 1277 (11th Cir. 2012) (quotation 

omitted).

Moultrie’s testimony provided ample basis for Counts 1 and 

5. He testified that he routinely worked with Sewell to deal drugs, 

and that they sold to Blackmon multiple times, often meeting him 

in person. The day of Sewell’s death, Moultrie says he and Sewell 

traveled to Enterprise to sell Blackmon between 25 and 30 pounds 

of marijuana, which their texts and calls confirmed. This history, 

combined with the other evidence presented—especially the fact 

that law enforcement found the duffel bag with over eighteen 

pounds of marijuana when they arrested Blackmon—allowed a 

reasonable jury to conclude that Blackmon possessed the drugs and 

intended to distribute them. 

Counts 2, 4, and 6 all relate to possession of a firearm. Count 

2 refers to Blackmon’s possession (as a felon) of a Beretta Model 

Px4 Storm handgun. This gun was used to kill Sewell and 

recovered the next day during Blackmon’s arrest. Count 4 relates 

to Blackmon’s possession of that same gun and two others on the 

day of his arrest. And Count 6 charged him with using a firearm in 

furtherance of a drug trafficking crime.

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For all counts, Blackmon claims that he had no actual or 

constructive possession of the firearms. To show such possession, 

the government needed to only show—using direct or 

circumstantial evidence—that Blackmon “was aware or knew of 

the firearm’s presence” and “had the ability and intent to later 

exercise dominion and control over that firearm.” United States v. 

Perez, 661 F.3d 568, 576 (11th Cir. 2011). Moreover, the firearm 

“need not be on or near the defendant’s person in order to amount 

to knowing possession.” Id. (quotation omitted).

Sufficient circumstantial evidence existed for a reasonable 

jury to conclude that Blackmon possessed the firearms and used 

the handgun to further a drug crime. For Counts 2 and 6, the 

evidence that we will discuss below—that Blackmon used the 

handgun to kill Sewell—supports these counts, most notably the 

eyewitness testimony and his DNA recovered from the weapon. 

For Count 4, the fact that law enforcement recovered all three 

firearms when they arrested Blackmon strongly supports that he 

knew about them and would later control them. But that was not 

all—a witness also testified that the rifle and shotgun were 

recovered from under furniture that Blackmon repeatedly reached 

under leading up to his arrest. A reasonable jury could infer that 

he possessed all three firearms from this and other evidence.

Finally, Count 3 stands as well. Along with our conclusions

about the other counts, a conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 924(j)(1)

requires that Blackmon “in the course” of committing the drug 

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trafficking crime, “cause[d] the death of a person through the use 

of a firearm” and that this killing be “murder.” 

The government presented ample evidence that Blackmon 

shot Sewell. For one, cellular location data showed that he was 

near the site of the shooting on that night. One of the defense’s 

witnesses said she saw Blackmon off and on at the house the day of

Sewell’s death. And two eyewitnesses placed Blackmon at the 

house where Sewell was shot when it happened. One was a man 

named Willie Coleman, who was at the house when law 

enforcement arrived. The other was Moultrie, who had travelled 

with Sewell to sell the marijuana to Blackmon. He told 

investigators that he saw Blackmon at the house that night. At 

trial, he recounted that he saw Sewell walk into the house—with 

the bag of marijuana, but no gun—and that after a few minutes, he 

heard gunshots. A forensic doctor testified that Sewell’s death was 

caused by his gunshot wounds, ruling it a homicide.

From this evidence, a reasonable jury could infer that 

Blackmon shot Sewell in furtherance of his drug crimes.2 The jury 

heard evidence about the ongoing drug trafficking conspiracy, 

multiple eyewitness testimony that Blackmon was in the house 

with Sewell and the marijuana, and DNA evidence linking him to 

2 Blackmon does not challenge the mens rea requirement of 18 U.S.C. 

§ 924(j)(1)—that the killing be with “malice aforethought”—so he has forfeited 

this argument. See 18 U.S.C. § 1111(a); Sapuppo, 739 F.3d at 681–82. His 

challenges revolve around the credibility of the witnesses and the possession 

of the gun used to kill Sewell. 

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the murder weapon. Altogether, and in the light most favorable to 

the verdict, sufficient evidence supported all six counts on appeal.

IV.

The court did not abuse its discretion in declining to sever 

Count 7. Generally, a court undertakes “a two-step analysis to 

determine whether separate charges were properly tried at the 

same time,” first analyzing initial joinder of counts under Rule 8(a) 

and then any request to sever under Rule 14(a). United States v. 

Walser, 3 F.3d 380, 385–87 (11th Cir. 1993); Fed. R. Crim. P. 8(a), 

14. Blackmon has only challenged the court’s refusal to sever 

under Rule 14(a). 

Relief under Rule 14 turns on a showing of prejudice. See 

Fed. R. Crim P. 14(a). But defendants must show more than “some 

prejudice” for us to find an abuse of discretion; a defendant must 

show both “an unfair trial” and “compelling prejudice.” Walser, 3 

F.3d at 386 (quotation omitted). This is a “heavy burden” that 

requires more than “mere conclusory allegations.” Id. (quotation 

omitted). 

Blackmon has not met this burden. In his brief, he only 

makes one specific allegation of prejudice: that Count 7 tended to

“show bad character on the part of Mr. Blackmon.” This 

allegation, standing alone, is not compelling enough to label the 

court’s decision an abuse of discretion, especially given how it 

specifically instructed the jury to consider each crime separately. 

See Hersh, 297 F.3d at 1244.

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V. 

Finally, Blackmon claims that his 480-month sentence is 

substantively unreasonable. In evaluating reasonableness, this 

Court considers the “totality of the circumstances” guided by the 

statutory factors set out in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a). United States v. Pugh, 

515 F.3d 1179, 1190 (11th Cir. 2008) (quotation omitted). 

Blackmon’s sentence is reasonable. To start, it fell within 

the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines range of 420 months to life, which 

supports a finding of reasonableness.3 Id.; 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(4). 

And the sentence was well below the statutory maximum here—

life imprisonment—which is another “indicator of a reasonable 

sentence.” See 18 U.S.C. § 924(j)(1); United States v. Taylor, 997 F.3d 

1348, 1355 (11th Cir. 2021). And finally, despite Blackmon’s 

arguments to the contrary, the sentencing transcript reveals that 

the court appropriately considered the other § 3553(a) factors. The 

court not only recited several factors verbatim, but also explained 

the weight it gave to Blackmon’s “extensive criminal history

involving guns and drugs and violence,” the effect of his actions on 

the victim and his family, the “danger to the community,” and 

more. We see no abuse of discretion. 

* * *

We AFFIRM.

3 On appeal, Blackmon does not challenge the Guidelines computation. 

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