Nashville, Tennessee – August 17, 2007 – Paul M. O’Brien, United States Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee announced that John Wyatt Mellies, age 51, of Charlotte, Tennessee, was sentenced yesterday afternoon to eight years imprisonment, followed by five years of supervised release. In May of this year, Mellies was convicted of one count of Possession of Child Pornography, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2252A(b)(1), following a three day federal jury trial.

The investigation of this defendant began in June 2004, when the defendant’s wife found over 47 compact discs in the marital home and turned those over to law enforcement officials with the Dickson County Sheriff’s Office in Charlotte, Tennessee. A forensic examination of the evidence uncovered thousands of images and videos depicting the sexual abuse and exploitation of children, including graphic scenes involving the infliction of pain on extremely young children.

The defendant was subsequently charged with possession of child pornography in the Middle District of Tennessee.

The testimony at the trial showed that the defendant had visited numerous Internet bulletin board sites for the purpose of retrieving child pornography. At the time of arrest, his collection, carefully catalogued on over two dozen compact discs and a laptop computer, contained over 11,000 still images and hundreds of videos of sexual exploitation of children, as well as approximately one hundred graphic text files describing adults engaged in sexual activity with young children. This media depicted mostly prepubescent female children, who were in sexually explicit poses or being sexually abused by adult males. Testimony from the forensic computer examiner revealed that the defendant had followed a pattern of collecting, cataloguing, and hiding child pornography for several years. The vast majority of the images and videos had been encrypted and password protected to hide the contents.

At sentencing, United States District Judge Thomas A. Higgins found that the defendant had possessed over 600 images of child pornography (the highest number considered by the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines) and that the pictures contained depictions of sadistic or masochistic conduct or other depictions of violence. As a result of these findings, Judge Higgins sentenced the defendant to 96 months’ imprisonment.

This case was investigated by the Dickson County Sheriff’s Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. The case was prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorneys S. Carran Daughtrey and Samuel G. Williamson.

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