“We had gone to North Carolina looking for justice and, God bless them, the people of Davidson County had delivered justice for us.”
It was with these words that Limerick woman Tracey Corbett Lynch described in her book her feelings in 2017 after a jury convicted Molly Martens and her father Thomas Martens of the second-degree murder of her brother Jason Corbett.
Six years on, Molly Martens, Corbett’s second wife, and her father are currently out of prison. The criminal case brought against them by the state of North Carolina is scheduled to return to a court in Lexington, a small town of about 20,000 people in the centre of the state, next week after a winding course through the legal system over recent years.
Molly and Thomas Martens had been sentenced to between 20 and 25 years in prison for killing Corbett, who moved from Limerick to the US for work. He had been brutally beaten by his wife and her father in their family home one night in August 2015.
However, both were released in April 2021 after the supreme court in North Carolina upheld an earlier appeal court ruling quashing their conviction.
The appeal court and the supreme court had ordered a retrial and this had been expected to take place in early November.
However, it remains to be seen whether the case will ever go before a jury again.
Over recent weeks there has been considerable speculation in legal circles in North Carolina that prosecutors and defence lawyers may be in discussion about a potential plea arrangement which would avoid any retrial.
There have been suggestions that any agreement could centre on voluntary manslaughter, which would be a lesser charge than second-degree murder.
The planned hearing on the case, scheduled to take place on Monday, is likely to reveal further details as to what has been going on privately in the background.
Apart from directing a retrial, the implications of the supreme court ruling would likely have forced changes in the way prosecutors would have had to handle any new case.
A plea agreement may be seen by the parties as the best way forward in the circumstances.
The judge in the case has imposed a gag order on the parties in the meantime.
If there is a voluntary plea agreement, there is likely to be much focus on any new sentencing that would be imposed on Molly and Thomas Martens, who spent nearly four years in jail before winning their appeal.
The case has generated considerable media attention in North Carolina as well as across the United States and internationally. It is likely to do so again when the new hearing commences next week.
The storyline has captured public attention.
A young American woman travels to Ireland to work as an au pair, looking after the children of a Limerick man who had just lost his wife. She subsequently marries him, moving with him back to the US before being convicted of killing him.
Molly and Thomas Martens argued in their original trial that they had killed Jason Corbett in self-defence, claiming that he attacked them and that their lives were in danger.
In her book, Tracey Corbett-Lynch maintained that not only had Molly Martens and her father murdered her brother but they had also sought afterwards to blacken his name and assassinate his character to cover their tracks.
Corbett’s family in Ireland contend that he was planning to take his two children, from his first marriage, back to Limerick at the time of his death. They contend that this was the backdrop to the attack on him in his bedroom in the early hours of August 2nd, 2015.
They have portrayed Molly Martens as a manipulating dangerous fantasist who wanted to hold on to Corbett’s two children.
When Corbett left Ireland with his children and moved with his second wife to the US to take up a new job, they settled in a place known as Panther Creek in Davidson County in North Carolina.
It is not too far from the city of Winston Salem, which has a population of about 250,000.
Davidson County, according to high-placed local figures, is more rural and much more conservative. The economy is based around farming with some manufacturing hubs.
The murder of a man by his wife in a luxury house in a gated community caused a sensation in the area. Locals say that the fact that Molly Martens’s father, who took part in the attack on Corbett, was a 30-year veteran of the FBI “added flavour” to the story.
In February a judge supported requests by defence lawyers that any retrial should be moved to Winston Salem. They argued that publicity about the case could have influenced potential jurors in the much-smaller Davidson County where the original trial took place.
Davidson County prosecutors said in the first trial that Molly Martens and Thomas Martens brutally beat Jason Corbett to death with a 28-inch baseball bat and a concrete paving brick.
Thomas Martens said he had gone to the room of his daughter and her husband after hearing a commotion while asleep downstairs. He said he found Jason Corbett with his hands on his daughter’s neck. Molly Martens and her father claimed they had acted in self-defence, fearing for their lives.
Both appealed after their conviction in 2017 and the appeals court and ultimately the supreme court in North Carolina found on their side as a result of what they considered to be prejudicial decisions made by the trial judge.
These revolved around statements made by Jason Corbett’s two children to social workers and staff in a child advocacy centre shortly after the death of their father as well as evidence provide by an expert witness and testimony given by Thomas Martens.
The children had told the social care personnel in North Carolina that their parents were not getting on well and that they had witnessed their father getting angrier a lot more and shouting and cursing at his wife.
The Corbett family maintain that the children later recanted these claims when they were taken back to Ireland and away from the Martens.
Another key element in the children’s interviews in North Carolina centred on the paving brick. They maintained that they had been planning to paint the brick and place it in the garden but did not do so because it had been raining, potentially providing a reason for why a brick had been in the master bedroom in the first place.
The trial judge ruled the children’s statements to be inadmissible. However, the court of appeal and the supreme court subsequently disagreed.
They concluded that the exclusion of the children’s statements deprived the jury of relevant and material evidence, essentially undermining the ability of Molly and Thomas Martens to mount a defence.
The appeal court also found the jury had been erroneously instructed to disregard testimony supporting the contention that Thomas Martens feared he would be killed or seriously injured.
The trial court had upheld a motion by the prosecution to strike from the record Thomas Martens’s testimony that he had heard his daughter scream: “Don’t hurt my dad.”
