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James Stewart Robinson’s mugshot. (Handout)
Summary: The former attorney who slit his dog’s throat has been sentenced.
A Birmingham attorney who pleaded guilty to animal cruelty and domestic violence, after he slit the family dog’s throat in 2012 and texted a picture of it to his now ex-wife, was sentenced to probation last Friday. James Stewart Robinson, 48, was also ordered to spend one day in jail for contacting his ex-wife, violating a sanction against it.
The contact seemed innocuous enough. He had emailed her a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year message last December, according to an AL.com report. “Not threatening or ugly, really just Merry Christmas. But, [his ex-wife] didn’t like him contacting her even in that way, according to the DA, and she contacted them about it,” Robinson’s attorney, John Wiley, explained.
Retired Clay Count Circuit Judge John Rochester had been specially appointed to hear the case and had ordered at the time of Robinson’s plea in July to cut contact with his ex-wife, “So, after sentencing, he [Rochester] ordered him [Robinson] to serve 24 hours in jail as a sanction for violating his previous order,” Wiley stated.
“We are very happy to have this unfortunate incident finally resolved and we believe that the resolution reached is a good, fair, and appropriate one,” Wiley said in an email to AL.com.
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The incident regards how hard Robinson took the news of his wife filing for divorce in 2012 when he lost weeks of sleep and intensified his addiction to Adderall, which he took for ADHD. Finally he killed Rufus, an American Staffordshire bull terrier, on June 17, 2012, and texted a picture of the dog’s slit throat this his wife with a voice mail saying “your day is coming girl.”
“Rufus was a very loving dog and I am horrified that I crossed a line that never in a million years I thought I would cross,” Robinson said during his plea last July.
Robinson was sentenced to two concurrent sentences: Five-years suspended sentence and three-years supervised probation for the class C felony cruelty to animals case for slitting the dog’s throat, and to a one-year suspended sentence with two-years supervised probation on misdemeanor domestic violence harassment charge for texting and voice-mailing the threat.
Robinson has been on inactive status as a lawyer since his arrest. On June 22, 2012, he was suspended on an interim basis, but filed a petition, granted July 10, 2012, to transfer that to “disability inactive status.”
Source: AL.com
