MOLLY MARTENS AND Thomas Martens will serve additional time in prison on top of the 44 months they served over the 2015 killing of Irish businessman Jason Corbett, a judge said in a sentencing hearing today.
Judge David Hall of Davidson Superior Court sentenced both defendants to 51 to 74 months in prison on voluntary manslaughter charges minus time served. Each gets credit for 44 months already served from sentences after their 2017 convictions.
The sentencing works out to 7 to 30 months of remaining active prison time for each defendant.
But their attorneys said after the hearing concluded in Lexington that each defendant will actually serve only seven months behind bars, thanks to good behaviour sentencing reduction they earned during their 44 months previously served.
Jason Corbett’s family and supporters were not happy with a sentence they considered far too short.
“I am at a loss for words,” one family member said on X, formerly known as Twitter. “No justice for Jason.”
The judge ordered that Molly Martens be handled with precautions against suicide and to undergo a psychiatric examination and any mental health treatment she needs.
Hall had each defendant stand for their sentencing and after announcing their prison terms had each handcuffed and led out of the courtroom by a sheriff’s deputy.
“Every criminal case should be a search for the truth,” Hall said before he sentenced Molly and Thomas Martens.
Hall said he listened carefully to the evidence that both sides presented in the sentencing hearing. However, he said he did “not know the truth” in this case.
He said he wondered why Thomas Martens didn’t tell his wife to call 911 after he heard the noises from the Corbetts’ bedroom when he grabbed a baseball bat to confront Jason Corbett.
“It makes no sense,” Hall said.
Hall said it also didn’t make sense that the Martens were basically unscathed when Jason Corbett’s body was so badly beaten.
As Thomas Martens stood in court awaiting his sentence, he told Hall he had great respect for the law, and had used the law to protect the country. Martens is a retired FBI agent.
“I am sorry,” Martens said about his actions on 2 August 2015, the day that Jason Corbett died.
When he saw Jason Corbett choking his daughter and was about drag her to a hallway, Thomas Martens said he had to act.
“I had no choice,” Martens said.
I did the best that I could.”
Molly Martens told Hall that she did the best she could as a wife to Jason Corbett and a mother to his children, Jack and Sarah.
“I made a decision to protect my father from certain death,” Molly Corbett said.
She added that she has endured a painful chapter in her life, and she is grateful for what she has accomplished in her life.
Before Hall sentenced the pair, he listened to Sarah Corbett and Jack Corbett, Jason Corbett’s children, give impact statements about their father’s death.
Sarah Corbett told Hall that defence witnesses and attorneys twisted her words when she was 8 to help Molly and Thomas Martens get lenient prison sentences.
Sarah Corbett, who is now 17, said she is receiving therapy as she tries to cope with the Martens’ use of lies to help their case over the past eight years.
“Molly Martens weaponised my love,” Sarah Corbett said.
I do not love Molly Martens. She is not my mother.”
The teenage girl said the Martens used her words when she was a child to make her father, Jason Corbett, look like a bad person to the world.
Since she was 4, Molly Corbett taught Sarah Corbett how to shoplift, how to vomit and how to lie, Sarah Corbett told Hall.
“I only got betrayed,” Sarah said. “I lied to help the Martens escape full justice for taking my father’s life.”
Sarah Corbett said she loved her father, and that Jason Corbett will never see his daughter get married or meet his grandchildren.
“He would call me his little princess,” Sarah about her father.
He would read to me. I felt safe and secure.”
In his statement to Hall, Jack Corbett admitted that he lied to investigators about the case when he was 10.
“I have lost so much of myself since the day he was taken,” Jack Corbett said. “My words were weaponised to help Molly and Thomas Martens get away with killing my dad.”
Jack Corbett described Molly Martens as a “living monster”, and that he never saw his father hit her.
“My dad didn’t deserve to be killed,” Jack Corbett said.
Molly Martens cried when Jack and Sarah Corbett spoke to Hall.
The teenagers urged Hall to give Molly and Thomas Martens the maximum sentence of 25 years allowed under state law.
“My dad’s life is worth more than a few years in prison,” Jack Corbett said to Hall.
Some local friends of Jason Corbett, including a woman who worked at a plant he managed, said they were disappointed by the sentencing.
“They should have gotten more time, because he was a good guy,” Patsy Miller said. Another woman, who didn’t want her name used, said: “You can’t just murder someone in cold blood.”
Prosecutor Alan Martin focused most of his attention on Molly Martens during his closing argument in a sentencing hearing, telling Judge David Hall that while her father Tom Martens had accepted responsibility for his actions in the death of his son-in-law Jason Corbett in 2015, Molly Martens had not.
“She lived a lie,” Martin said, asserting that Molly Martens had acted on “her desire for what she did not have” – namely, custody of Jason Corbett’s two children by his previous wife, who died in 2006.
Martin claimed that Molly Martens provoked an argument the night her husband died in hopes of setting the stage to get a domestic violence order that would give her custody of the children, whom she feared her husband was about to take to his native Ireland.
By Martin’s account, Molly Martens, who worked as the children’s nanny before marrying Jason Corbett, had planned even then to get custody of the children.
“Molly was all about the kids,” the prosecutor said. “And they are not her kids.”
Jason Corbett died during a rain of blows from an aluminium baseball bat wielded by Tom Martens on that August night in 2015, and Molly Martens struck her husband with a paver during the fight.
Martens told investigators he struck Jason Corbett because he was choking her daughter.
The prosecutor called Molly Martens’ account of what happened the night her husband died as unreliable as other lies he said the woman had told that she had a dead sister, and had stretch marks from giving birth to Sarah Corbett.
Martin said Molly Martens blamed everything that happened before the night of the death on Jason Corbett, and everything afterward on her own father.
Both father and daughter have entered voluntary manslaughter pleas for the death of Jason Corbett in 2015.
Tom Martens pleaded guilty to the charge, and Molly Martens pleaded no contest. Both acknowledged in their pleas that the force used against Jason Corbett was based on their fears but was also excessive.
The prosecutor cast doubt on Molly Martens’s claim she was strangled, saying that she didn’t tell investigators that in the immediate aftermath of the incident.
Casting doubt on defense accounts of calling 911 immediately, the prosecutor said that Martens did not show the laboured breathing on the 911 call that one would expect if it was made quickly.
Molly Martens looked the other way when the prosecutor talked about the impact of the crime on the two Corbett children sitting on the prosecutor’s side of the courtroom.
And those children and some close family members with them all got up and left the courtroom when the attorneys for Molly and Tom Martens got up to make their final arguments.
Doug Kingsbery, Molly Martens attorney, told the judge that Molly Martens told first responders that it wasn’t the first time that her husband had struck her, that she showed redness on her neck and that she got into a fetal position outside the home because she was in such distress.
Urine stains on her pyjamas are evidence of strangulation, he said.
Kingsbery also said all the lethal blows against Jason Corbett came from the bat and not Molly Martens’s paving stone.
Attorneys for both Molly and Tom Martens asked the judge for lenient sentences with no more active time in prison.
One of Martens’s lawyers, Jones Byrd, told the court that an active sentence for his client would be a “manifest injustice”, noting he had already served 44 months in prison before he won a new trial because of errors in the first 2017 trial.
The case was expected to go to a new trial this autumn, but the plea deal intervened.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say