LAST UPDATE | 31 Oct 2023
A SUPERIOR COURT judge will determine sentences for Molly Corbett and her father, Thomas Martens, after both entered arranged pleas in the death of Irishman Jason Corbett, Molly Corbett’s husband at the time of his death in 2015.
Martens, accused of beating Jason Corbett with a baseball bat, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter.
Molly Corbett, accused of striking her husband with a paver, pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter, although Superior Court Judge David Hall said that a no contest plea is treated as a form of a guilty plea.
It took the court only 45 minutes to receive and accept the pleas, setting up sentencing hearings for both Martens and Corbett that could take a week to resolve, one attorney said.
Prosecutor Alan Martin told the court that the plea agreement took months to negotiate and had only recently been fully resolved.
The pleas are to a lesser charge than that of second-degree murder which each also faced prior to the plea arrangement.
The second-degree murder charges were dropped on Monday.
The voluntary manslaughter conviction carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison, but that’s only if there are extensive aggravating factors that are unlikely to come into play.
Judge Hall said during court on Monday that he has the option of giving what would be the much more lenient sentence of probation without active time in prison.
Jason Corbett’s children from a previous marriage, who were in Corbett’s Davidson County home the night he was killed, sat in the courtroom on Monday and quietly watched the proceedings.
Jack Corbett, 10 when his father died, and his sister Sarah, then 8, are now in their teens.
After the death of his first wife and while the children were small, Jason Corbett, an Irish businessman, hired Molly Corbett to help with the children. The couple then dated and married in Tennessee in 2011.
Jason Corbett was found dead in the home he shared with Molly Corbett on 2 August, 2015.
Molly Corbett and Thomas Martens were accused of brutally beating Jason Corbett to death with a baseball bat and a concrete paving brick.
The pair claimed self-defence, saying Jason Corbett attacked them and threatened their lives.
As the sentencing hearing got under way yesterday, one of Martens’ attorneys, Jay Vannoy, told the court that Martens “is accepting responsibility that his actions were excessive” as he repeatedly struck Corbett with a baseball bat.
“We don’t deny that he hit multiple times,” Vannoy said. “The question at sentencing is why?”
Vannoy argued that the answer was because Martens was so emotionally distraught by seeing Jason Corbett allegedly assault Molly Corbett that his perception and cognition were impaired.
Vannoy said that at one point in his questioning, Martens told authorities, “I can’t really explain what it is like seeing your daughter being strangled”.
Molly Corbett’s attorney, Doug Kingsbery, said his client was given evidence that Jason Corbett had killed his first wife and that she could share the same fate.
Kingsbery also said that Molly Corbett was still trying to revive her husband when emergency responders arrived, and told a firefighter, “Help him, please”.
Molly Corbett was crying, had fingernail marks on her throat from her husband’s assault and was seen assuming a foetal position on the ground outside the house. Corbett also said afterwards that it wasn’t the first time her husband had assaulted her.
Martens, through his lawyer, is claiming at least 10 mitigating factors that lawyers say warrant a lower sentencing.
Those factors were not fully explained in court on Monday, but included Martens being under duress.
Noting that Martens had spent 44 months in prison until he won a new trail, Vannoy said that if someone searches Martens’ name, “all you read about is him is being a murderer, a cold calculated murderer”.
Martens and Molly Corbett both entered their pleas on the voluntary manslaughter charge “on the theory of imperfect self-defense or defense of another,” according to court documents.
“Upon the defendant’s plea, the state concedes the defendant actually believed that defensive force was necessary but contends that at some point during the encounter that belief became unreasonable, and the amount of force employed was excessive,” the plea agreement for each defendant reads.
The plea specifies that prosecutors do not embrace any other legal theory, including “any theory that includes premeditation or malice as an element of the offence”.
During a previous trial in 2017, prosecutors maintained that Martens and Corbett concocted a story of self-defence to cover a crime that sprung from motives of malice toward Jason Corbett.
A Davidson County jury convicted them in a high-profile trial in August 2017 of second-degree murder. A judge sentenced each of them to 20 to 25 years in prison.
However, the North Carolina Court of Appeals later overturned the conviction, finding that the trial judge made prejudicial decisions that prevented the two from mounting a defence.
The North Carolina Supreme Court affirmed the lower appellate court’s ruling, sending the case back to Davidson County for a re-trial.
The second trial for Corbett and Martens was scheduled to begin 6 November with jury selection in Forsyth Superior Court.
The judge set that trial date in late April, after granting a request from the attorneys of Corbett and Martens in mid-February to move their trial from Davidson County to Winston-Salem.
The judge had imposed a gag order on everyone involved in the case, including prosecutors, criminal defence attorneys and potential witnesses, prohibiting them from making any public statements.
The judge lifted the order on Monday, since there will be no jury trial.
Molly Corbett, through her attorney, declined comment during a break in the proceedings, and Martens said before the hearing he would have no comment. Jack and Sarah Corbett also declined to speak.
The sentencing hearing was set to begin at 2pm yesterday (Eastern Time Zone).
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