The adult daughter of Alamance County’s sheriff is about to head to the state’s second highest court to appeal a criminal conviction for selling a fatal dose of illegal narcotics to an overdose victim in 2021.
The N.C. Court of Appeals is slated to hear oral arguments on Tuesday to determine if Emily Jean Robinson did, in fact, get a fair hearing when she was tried for “death by distribution” and several other drug-related offenses in May of 2024.
The daughter of Alamance County’s long-serving sheriff Terry Johnson, Robinson was ultimately found guilty on all counts by a jury comprised of Alamance County residents. The 44-year-old Snow Camp resident was then sentenced to a prison term of 5 to 7 years by a special superior court judge who had been assigned to preside over her trial.
During the upcoming hearing, the state court of appeals will consider several factors that Robinson’s attorney believes prejudiced the outcome of the trial against her. These sticking points include the judge’s refusal to let the attorneys who represented Robinson at trial make two sets of closing arguments, questions about the testimony of a toxicology expert who didn’t personally run the tests he shared with the court, and the judge’s decision to roll an additional charge into Robinson’s sentence for death by distribution.
A fourth issue that will come up on appeal is the effectiveness of the defense counsel that Robinson had retained during the trial.
These four arguments are currently Robinson’s best hope to get out from under a legal predicament that has dogged her ever since she had a fateful encounter with a man who went on to die from a drug overdose.
According to court records, Robert James Starner, Jr. approached Robinson on September 14, 2021 after some mutual acquaintances suggested that he could buy drugs from her to sate his persistent craving for heroin. Starner visited the defendant’s home at 7408 Bass Mountain Road and purchased some illicit Fentanyl, which Robinson was reportedly using herself without a prescription.
Starner apparently had a bad reaction to the narcotic, which he and a friend took on the way home from Bass Mountain Road. Later that night, Starner’s family grew worried about his wellbeing, which prompted an emergency phone call and the eventual discovery that he had succumbed to an overdose.
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According to court records, members of Burlington’s police force eventually traced the lethal dose of Fentanyl back to Robinson. On September 16, she “voluntarily” came in to the police department’s headquarters and spoke with investigators. During the interview, Robinson reportedly admitted she had both used and sold Fentanyl. A further confession, which she later retracted according to her attorney, implicated her in the sale of the black-market narcotic to Starner. In the meantime, the city’s police officers searched Robinson’s home, where they turned up several items of suspected contraband.
In the immediate wake of this interview, Burlington’s police department charged Robinson with felony-level offenses for selling Fentanyl to Starner, possessing Fentanyl with the intent to sell or deliver the drug, and maintaining a dwelling for the storage or sale of a controlled substance. The department also issued a misdemeanor charge against Robinson for the possession of drug paraphernalia.
It wasn’t until July 6 of the following year that Burlington’s police department initiated another, separate case against Robinson for the felony-level offense of death by distribution. This charge was based on additional evidence that wasn’t initially at the department’s disposal, including toxicology screenings that went on to play a prominent role when Robinson’s case went to trial.
Due to her familial relationship with the sheriff, the local district attorney’s office asked the state to assign a team of prosecutors from outside the county to handle the case against Robinson. This appointed team went on to assemble a single case from charges that Burlington’s police department had filed, and in May of 2024, the consolidated case went to trial before Edwin G. Wilson, Jr., a retired superior court judge who had been specially appointed by the governor’s office.
Although Robinson entered a “not guilty” plea to all of the charges she faced, her attorneys from the Graham-based law firm of Hunt and White chose not to call any new witnesses on her behalf after the prosecutors had rested their case. Instead, Robinson’s defense team asked the presiding judge for permission to make closing arguments before, and after, the state had a chance to sum up its case. The defense team argued that the rules of legal procedure entitled them to this consideration in the absence of a formal defense. The judge disagreed, and his ruling would go on to lay the groundwork for one of the four pillars in Robinson’s appeal.
In addition to this procedural matter, which had prompted the original defense team to call for a mistrial, three other aspects of Robinson’s trial have been called into question by Amanda Zimmer, who has been tasked with her defense now that it has reached the appellate level.
One of Zimmer’s objections concerns the judge’s decision to factor in a charge of Fentanyl sale when he determined Robinson’s sentence. Zimmer insists that this particular charge was subordinate to death by distribution, which she contends smacks of the “manifest injustice of being convicted of two offenses that were the same for double jeopardy purposes.”
Zimmer also takes Robinson’s prosecutors to task for the expert witness they chose to present Starner’s postmortem toxicology reports to the court. Zimmer points out that the state’s expert didn’t personally conduct the tests he presented. She also observes that Robinson’s original defense team failed to object to this second-hand testimony – which serves as the basis for her fourth and final argument that Robinson lacked the “effective assistance of counsel” at trial.
In her final analysis, Zimmer contends that these four factors resulted in a fundamentally flawed outcome, which warrants a retrial of the case against Robinson. She goes on to offer the appeals court some additional color from Robinson’s trial to emphasize her overall view that a terrible injustice has been perpetrated against the defendant.
“Emily had no prior record level points,” the defense lawyer adds in her brief to the court. “At sentencing, her attorneys explained that Emily had injured her ankle and was given pain pills…They presented evidence that Emily had entered a drug treatment program at Living Free Ministries and ‘worked hard to complete her program.’
“The judge consolidated all offenses,” she continues, “and sentenced Emily to an active sentence of 60 to 84 months. He did not find any mitigating factors.
Since Zimmer originally sent her brief to the appeals court in March, her counterpart for the state has filed his own thorough rebuttal of Robinson’s four-point appeal.
On July 7, the state’s counsel Zachary Dunn submitted a 62-page brief that includes an exhaustive justification of the prosecution’s expert testimony, a carefully-parsed comparison of “death by distribution” with the supposedly duplicative charge, and a detailed account of the trial’s closing arguments. Dunn also notes that Robinson’s original defense counsel had only called for a mistrial after regaling the court with a 79 minute summation that followed the state’s closing argument.
On Tuesday, October 21, the two appellate counsels will have an opportunity to present their positions directly to a three-judge panel from the N.C. Court of Appeals. The appellate tribunal is slated to convene at 10:00 a.m. at the Duke University Law School in Durham. The three judges who’ve been assigned to the panel are Allegra Collins, Jefferson Griffin, and Michael Stading.
