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Given the circumstances, William H. Noble, 56, of Lowell, MA will be sentenced this time to a mandatory minimum of 15 years, Acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Rachael A. Honig said.
Noble was a month away from being paroled from the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Dix when he was arrested by the FBI in February 2018, records show.
He’d been sentenced to 81 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to child porn trafficking charges in U.S. District Court in Boston in 2012.
Agents used informants inside FCI-Fort Dix to find that Noble and seven other defendants conspired to download images of child sex abuse from the dark web using cellphones that had been smuggled into the low-security prison in Burlington County, Honig said.
Some, like Noble, were serving lengthy sentences for child-porn convictions, the U.S. attorney said.
Ring members 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, according to federal court documents.
Noble “transferred a micro SD card containing over 2,400 images and nearly 100 videos of child sexual abuse to a government informant,” Honig said last week.
“Many of the images and videos depicted the sexual abuse of prepubescent children, including infants and toddlers,” she said.
The other seven 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 in U.S. District Court in Camden.
Those jurors convicted him last week of conspiring to receive and distribute child pornography, receiving child pornography, distributing child pornography, possessing child pornography and accessing child pornography on federal property following a three-day trial, Honig said.
U.S. District Judge Joseph H. Rodriguez scheduled sentencing for Feb. 3, 2022. Noble will remain in federal custody until then.
Honig credited special agents of the FBI with the investigation leading to the verdict, secured by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Andrew B. Johns and David E. Malagold of her Criminal Division.
She also thanked officials of both the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and FCI-Fort Dix for their assistance.
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