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William H. Noble, of Lowell, MA, will have to live into his late 90s in order to see freedom again.
Noble, 57, originally was imprisoned for 81 months following a guilty plea to federal child-porn trafficking charges in Boston in 2012.
He was only a month from being paroled from the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Dix in Lakehurst when he was charged by the FBI in February 2018.
Using informants, agents learned that Noble and seven accomplices collected images of child sex abuse from the dark web using cellphones that had been smuggled into the low-security prison in Burlington County.
Some, like Noble, were serving lengthy sentences for child-porn convictions, authorities said.
The FCI-Fort Dix inmates used various cloud services to store the images, which they then exchanged on micro SD cards, one of which was hidden in a cut-out section of a Bible, U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Philip R. Sellinger said.
Noble alone “transferred a micro SD card containing over 2,400 images and nearly 100 videos of child sexual abuse” to one of the informants, the U.S. attorney said.
“Many of the images and videos depicted the sexual abuse of prepubescent children, including infants and toddlers,” he said.
The seven other defendants in the case all took deals from the government, pleading guilty in exchange for potential leniency at sentencing.
Noble took his chances with a jury– and lost big.
After a three-day trial in Camden, federal jurors convicted him last November of conspiring to receive and distribute child pornography, receiving child pornography, distributing child pornography, possessing child pornography and accessing child pornography on federal property.
U.S. District Judge Joseph H. Rodriguez, who presided over the trial, sentenced Noble to 480 months on Thursday, Sept. 15.
Noble must serve just about all of that sentence because there’s no parole in the federal prison system. He'd have to live to 97 to finally see freedom again.
And should he make it that far, Noble would also have to spend five years on supervised release, the judge ruled.
Sellinger credited special agents of the FBI for the investigation leading to the verdict and sentence, secured by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Andrew B. Johns and David E. Malagold of his Criminal Division. He also thanked officials of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and at FCI-Fort Dix for their assistance.
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