United States v. Sean Christopher Williams

── United States v. Sean Christopher Williams ── Court: Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Date: May 11, 2026 Category: General NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PUBLICATION File Name: 26a0209n.06 Case No. 25-5174 UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT FILED May 11, 2026 ) KELLY L. STEPHENS, Clerk UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ) Plaintiff-Appellee, ) ) ON APPEAL FROM THE UNITED v. ) STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR ) THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF SEAN CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS, ) TENNESSEE Defendant-Appellant. ) ) OPINION Before: READLER, DAVIS, and BLOOMEKATZ, Circuit Judges. READLER, Circuit Judge. Sean Christopher Williams was convicted on three counts of manufacturing child pornography and sentenced to 1,080 months in prison. On appeal, he contests the district court’s admission of purportedly prejudicial evidence, the sufficiency of the evidence used to convict him, and the length of his within-Guidelines sentence. Seeing no error on any of these fronts, we affirm. I. Around 2 a.m., a campus police officer in North Carolina came upon a man passed out in the driver’s seat of an idling vehicle. Shining his flashlight into the vehicle, the officer spotted drugs and drug paraphernalia. The officer awakened the sleeping man and ultimately arrested him. Despite the man’s refusal to disclose his identity, officers found a driver’s license bearing the name Sean Williams. Williams, it turns out, had an active warrant for his arrest on a federal gun charge. No. 25-5174, United States v. Williams (His eventual conviction in that case is the subject of a separate appeal. United States v. Williams, No. 25-5175.) After the arrest, officers secured a warrant to search Williams’s vehicle. There, they found large quantities of various drugs, drug paraphernalia, and over $100,000 in cash. In the vehicle’s cupholder, the officers also discovered two thumb drives. After obtaining another warrant, the university police chief searched the thumb drives’ contents. One contained child pornography. Upon learning of these developments, an FBI special agent further analyzed the drives. On the first, the agent identified well over 100,000 images and videos of child pornography. The second, meanwhile, contained images of adult women being sexually assaulted. From the images, the agent identified three minors depicted in photos taken inside Williams’s apartment in Tennessee. The agent also discovered photos and videos of Williams sexually assaulting three unconscious women whom the agent identified as the minor victims’ mothers. The government indicted Williams on three counts of manufacturing child pornography in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2251(a) and (e). Just weeks into the case, Williams’s counsel moved to withdraw from the representation, prompting a hearing before the district court. Along the way to that hearing, Williams escaped from the transport van. Following a multi-state manhunt, authorities found Williams in Florida, leading the government to add an escape charge to Williams’s original gun case. As for the child pornography prosecution, the government filed notices of intent to offer evidence of Williams’s uncharged bad acts at trial. The district court held a hearing on the admissibility of t