Man sentenced to 20 years in killing following argument
Slain man’s daughter to killer: ‘The time is always right to do right’
Francina Ogburn said she had one wish for the man who killed her father.
“I don’t have any animosity toward the defendant,” Ogburn said in an Orange County courtroom Friday as Joseph Robinson stood nearby, looking down. “I just pray that when he gets out in 20 years [he will] try to give his kids what he robbed from me, that I couldn’t get from my dad. The time is always right to do right. If God spares his life these 20 years, I pray that Mr. Robinson just be the father that he robbed me of having, to his kids.”
Robinson, 50, pleaded no contest to killing John Stubbs during an argument in 2016. Circuit Judge Jenifer Harris on Friday sentenced him to 20 years in prison.
Stubbs was 69 when he died. He had survived the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, where children were abused for decades. Nine months before his death, he lost his wife of 40 years. Ogburn, the second-oldest of his 10 children, said she first met him when she was 13, but that they didn’t become close until his wife died.
“With her being gone it seemed like he needed a sense of belonging,” Ogburn said. “So he reached out to me.”
In 2015, Stubbs spent his last Christmas with Ogburn, her husband, and their three children.
“I just hate that I could not continue that bond that we started after my stepmom was killed, because I wanted to learn from him, and I know that he could have learned from me. And now we don’t have that,” Ogburn said. Stubbs and Robinson were drinking and playing dominoes with some friends April 8, 2016, when Stubbs asked Robinson to go to the store and get him some scratch-off lottery tickets, court records show. Stubbs often played, and had won sums in the thousands of dollars before, his granddaughter said after his death.
Robinson came back without the lottery tickets and without the cash Stubbs gave him, records show. He and Stubbs started arguing — Stubbs pulled out a knife and cut Robinson, and Robinson walked away, saying he was going to go find the promised scratch-off tickets, court records show.
But when Robinson returned he had what witnesses described as an ax — possibly a broomstick with a blade on the end. He hit Stubbs twice, killing him, records show. Deputies never found the weapon.
After Ogburn spoke Friday, Robinson said he was “sorry for the whole thing.”
Ogburn said she often asked Stubbs for a paternity test so she could be certain that he was her dad. He didn’t see why she wanted that, she said.
Ogburn said she didn’t like to swear, but in court Friday she quoted her father.
“You’re a damn fool if you don’t believe that I’m your dad,” Ogburn recalled him saying. “You can take a test, but I am your dad.”
After Stubbs was killed, Ogburn got the DNA test she wanted. Stubbs was her father.