Molly Martens and her father, Thomas Martens, have been sentenced to serve between seven months and 30 months in prison over the killing of Limerick businessman Jason Corbett in August 2015.
The two were led away in handcuffs from a court in Lexington, North Carolina on Wednesday afternoon following an eight-day sentencing hearing.
Judge David Hall imposed a sentence of a minimum of 51 months and a maximum of 74 months in prison. However, they will receive credit for the 44 months they spent in jail after a trial in 2017 for second-degree murder before those sentences were quashed by an appeal court.
Following a plea agreement with prosecutors late last month, Molly Martens did not contest a charge of voluntary manslaughter. Her father pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter.
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Mr Corbett was beaten to death with a baseball bat and a brick in the bedroom of the family home near Winston-Salem in North Carolina in the early hours of August 2nd, 2015.
Molly Martens and her father had claimed they had killed him in self defence after he had choked and threatened to kill her.
The judge raised questions as to why Thomas Martens, an experienced former FBI agent, had not called for police backup when he heard the commotion in the house as well as taking a baseball bat upstairs to investigate himself what was going on.
He also asked why Martens’s wife, Sharon, who was in the house that night, had also not called the police.
He said the court had not heard directly from Sharon Martens. He said based on her documented words, she had heard noise upstairs but then left it to her husband to take care of things.
“It makes no sense,” he said.
The judge also pointed to “an enormous disparity” between the state of Jason Corbett’s body and the condition of Molly Martens and her father after the incident.
He said the delicate bracelet on her arm was not broken and neither was the nylon in her pyjamas.
The judge said Molly Martens and her father should receive some mitigation including his service in the FBI and in the national defence and energy sectors.
In a statement to the court before sentencing, Molly Martens said she truly did her best as a wife, mother and human.
“There is not a day or an hour goes by that I do not feel the weight of my actions.
“I deeply mourn what could have been a different path for all of us.”
She said she had protected her father from what she thought was certain death.
Thomas Martens told the court he realised his actions on the night were “excessive and in violation of the law”.
“I am sorry,” he said.
He said he had repeatedly begged his son-in-law to let go of his wife “but when he started to drag her down the hallway to the bathroom, my instincts to protect my daughter took over”.
The court heard powerful emotional testimony from Mr Corbett’s two children, who were aged 10 and eight when their father was killed.
In evidence not given in open court during the sentencing hearing Jack Corbett, now aged 19, said he had been abused by Molly Martens in every way.
He said she had taught him to lie and manipulate people.
“I was a liar,” he said.
“I never witnessed my dad hit Molly Martens.”
He said his words as a child had been “weaponised” to help Molly Martens and her father to get away with killing his father.
He claimed that the entire Martens family had been “complicit” and that his father’s phone and laptop had been in the house of the brother of Molly Martens.
He urged that she be imprisoned for as long as possible.
Sarah Corbett, who is now 17-years-old, said Molly Martens had “taught me to shoplift, vomit and be a liar”.
She spoke of how Molly Martens would hit her brother and would punish them with starvation. She said Molly Martens had removed her wedding ring a few days after her husband’s death and told his children to get over it.
Ms Corbett said Molly Martens had thrown a framed photo she had of her birth mother Margaret Corbett – the first wife of Jason Corbett – down the stairs and screamed at her that the woman was dead.
She said after Jason Corbett’s sister had secured custody of his two children and brought them back to Ireland, Molly Martens had tried to have a plane fly a banner over her new school. Molly Martens had also contacted a girl who sat beside her in class, she said.
Ms Corbett said that when she was just five years old, Molly Martens had told her that her father had killed her mother.
Tracey Corbett Lynch, the sister of Jason Corbett, told the court that after they had killed her brother, Molly Martens and her father had tried to destroy his good name.
She said that Jason Corbett “abhorred violence” and that her brother was not the man the defence had tried to depict in the sentencing hearing – where counsel claimed he had been verbally and physically abusive to his wife. She described him as a decent, kind and loving man.
Ms Corbett Lynch said that even when there were warning signs before his wedding to Molly Martens, when he learned she was taking medication for a psychiatric disorder and had told people she knew his first wife before her death, he was committed to her.
