A former Snow Camp woman whose May 2024 conviction of death by distribution was upheld by the state’s second-highest court earlier this year has now asked the North Carolina Supreme Court to hear her appeal.
Emily Jean Robinson, 45, white, female, has filed a petition for discretionary review by the N.C. Supreme Court, after the appellate court reaffirmed her convictions earlier this year.
Robinson is asking the N.C. Supreme Court to review whether the Appeals Court erred in concluding that no prejudice arose from the denial of her right to have her attorneys give two closing arguments at her trial and that a visiting judge had properly allowed a forensic expert to testify about the results of toxicology tests he hadn’t performed.
State law provides for a “petition for discretionary review” (PDR), asking the N.C. Supreme Court to hear an appeal of a decision in a case for which the state Court of Appeals has already issued an opinion.
The Supreme Court typically agrees to hear a PDR if the case meets at least one of the following criteria: It involves significant public interest; involves legal principles of major significance; and/or the appellate opinion conflicts with earlier decisions issued by the N.C. Supreme Court, according to the procedural background cited in Robinson’s petition.
Robinson was convicted at the conclusion of her trial in Alamance County superior court in May 2024 of possession with intent to sell or deliver a controlled substance (Fentanyl); sale of a controlled substance; maintaining a dwelling for a controlled substance; and possession of drug paraphernalia.
She was charged in connection with the September 2021 death of Robert James Starner, Jr., then 29, white, male, who died of a drug overdose at his parents’ home in Burlington after ingesting Fentanyl that investigators later determined had been purchased from Robinson.
The drug-related charges against Robinson were centered on felony death by distribution of Fentanyl, under a law passed by the General Assembly in 2019 and intended to combat the nation’s opioid crisis. Robinson’s trial in May 2024 appeared to be the first death by distribution case prosecuted in Alamance County, court officials told The Alamance News at the time.
A visiting special superior court judge, Edwin G. Wilson, Jr. presided over Robinson’s trial in May 2024. Two attorneys from the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys, Lisa Marie Coltrain and Jordan Matthew Ford, prosecuted the case.
Following a six-day trial, jurors deliberated less than an hour before convicting Robison on all charges. She was sentenced to a minimum of five years and a maximum of seven years in state prison.
Basis for PDR
For her appeals court case, Robinson contended that Wilson had erred in allowing testimony by Dr. Justin Brower, a forensic toxicologist from the State Crime Lab. Brower confirmed at the trial that he hadn’t performed the toxicology exam on Starner following his overdose but was nonetheless allowed to testify about the results of tests performed by another analyst.
That admission of Brower’s testimony allegedly deprived Robinson of her Sixth Amendment right under the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees defendants the right to confront and cross-examine witnesses, according to Robinson’s petition for discretionary review.
A 2024 ruling by the N.C. Supreme Court, which deals with expert testimony about forensic toxicology, established that, “When an expert relies on another analyst’s statements as the basis for their opinion, the statements of the absent expert are…subject to cross-examination,” Robinson asserts.
Robinson also appealed on grounds that Wilson had erred by denying her attorneys the right to “open and close the arguments” and by allowing sentencing both for death by distribution and sale of a controlled substance, as well as ineffective assistance of counsel.
Brower had “opined Starner likely ingested” methamphetamine, cocaine, and Fentanyl within 24 hours of his death, without explaining how the testing worked; whether a computer printed any results; or how the final toxicology report was produced, according to Robinson’s petition for review. “Instead, he simply stated the outcome of the testing that others had performed,” her petition notes.
The Court of Appeals concluded in the opinion issued earlier this year that the toxicology results “were admissible even though the analysts did not testify because in North Carolina, the Confrontation clause does not apply to computer-generated data created by a machine without human judgment,” as Robinson notes in her petition to the Supreme Court.
That raises a “significant constitutional question,” her attorney contends, about whether a supervisor should be permitted to testify about the results of testing he had not conducted, relying “instead on information gathered by analysts to form his opinion.”
Alleged violation of right to open and close arguments prior to jury instruction
At the close of evidence during her trial in Alamance County, Robinson’s attorneys, George Hunt and Octavis White of Graham, asked Wilson, the special superior court judge, about the order of closing arguments, explaining that it had been the practice in Alamance County to allow the defense to give opening and closing arguments, while the state gave its argument in the middle.
Wilson told her attorneys, “I don’t know about Alamance County, but I’m not doing it that way,” Robinson notes in the background for her Supreme Court petition. “But you guys do get closing argument…You don’t go first and then last also.”
Hunt and White registered their objections, arguing that Rule 10 within the state’s General Rules of Practice for Superior and District Courts allowed them to make both an opening and closing argument because they hadn’t presented evidence. The prosecutors countered that “there was no prejudice.”
Wilson concluded that “any possible error did not result in any substantial prejudice,” according to the case background cited in Robinson’s petition for review by the state Supreme Court.
Once Wilson delivered his instructions and sent jurors to deliberate, the defense motioned for a mistrial, which the judge also denied.
The “Rule 10” that Hunt and White had pointed to states: “In all cases, civil or criminal, if no evidence is introduced by the defendant, the right to open and close the argument to the jury shall belong to him.” The state Supreme Court “has not addressed what happens when the trial court improperly forbids a defendant from opening the jury arguments but allows them to conclude the arguments,” but it has repeatedly found a violation of that right to be prejudicial, Robinson’s attorneys note in her petition for review.
In rejecting those grounds in Robinson’s appeal, the Appeals Court didn’t acknowledge its own precedents, finding that denial of the right to open and close jury arguments to be intrinsically prejudicial. For example, a 2012 opinion issued by the Appeals Court established, “Improperly depriving a defendant of the right to open and close argument to the jury, a right deemed to be critically important, entitles [the] defendant to a new trial,” according to one of the half-dozen precedents cited in Robinson’s petition.
Four decisions by the state Supreme Court – in 1988, 1987, 1986, and 1932 – conflict with the opinion issued in January 2026 by the Court of Appeals, which acknowledged that Robinson’s attorneys did not deliver the first closing argument to the jury but concluded that the deprivation of that right had not been “prejudicial per se” to the outcome of her trial.
Robinson is the daughter of Alamance County sheriff Terry Johnson. She is currently being represented by Glenn Gerding and Amanda S. Zimmer of the state Office of the Appellate Defender in Durham.
Zachary K. Dunn, a special deputy attorney general for the N.C. Department of Justice, is the attorney for the state, according to Robinson’s Supreme Court file.
Robinson is currently incarcerated at Anson Correctional Institution, a minimum-security prison in Polkton, according to the state Department of Adult Corrections.
