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Molly Martens and her father Thomas Martens are to be released from prison in North Carolina this week – months earlier than expected – according to the US prison authorities.
In early November Molly Martens and her father Thomas Martens were sentenced to serve between seven months and 30 months in prison over the killing of Limerick businessman Jason Corbett in August 2015.
A spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Adult Corrections said on Monday that Tom Martens would be released on Tuesday, December 5th, while Molly Martens would be freed on Wednesday December 6th.
He said the Department of Adult Corrections had received release orders for Thomas Martens and Molly Martens.
Mr Corbett had married Molly Martens who had originally come to Ireland to look after his two children following the death of his first wife. The family later moved to a house near Winston Salem in North Carolina.
At a court in Lexington North Carolina Judge David Hall imposed a sentence of a minimum of 51 months and a maximum of 74 months in prison. However, they were to 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.
Molly Martens and her father are now to be released considerably earlier than anticipated after the sentencing hearing in November.
The district attorney in Davidson County in North Carolina, who was the lead prosecutor in the case, was unavailable to comment on the issue on Monday morning.
A local TV news channel in North Carolina, Fox 8, reported on Monday that the move to release Molly Martens and Thomas Corbett earlier than expected had come following a decision by a body known as Combined Records in the state capital of Raleigh.
The local TV channel said Molly Martens and Thomas Martens would be on parole for nine months.
The Department of Adult Corrections says on its website that the Combined Records body is responsible for the development and maintenance of offender records and the sentence calculation for all offenders incarcerated in its prison facilities. It says staff of Combined Records maintain the data responsible for determining each offender’s release date.
“Information is obtained from many sources including the courts, the Post-Release Supervision/Parole Commission, the North Carolina Department of Justice, Attorney General’s Office and federal, state and county law enforcement agencies.”
“Combined Records records Judgments & Commitments, computes offender sentences, determines release dates, works with the Division of Prisons on time adjustments, and responds to detainer and notification requests. The Sentencing section completes sentence audits for new admissions, additional sentences, sentence modifications, vacates, reversed and/or remanded for a new trial.”
Following a plea agreement with prosecutors in late October, Molly Martens did not contest a charge of voluntary manslaughter in relation to the killing of her husband. Her father pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter.
Prosecutors dropped charges of second degree murder as part of the plea agreement.
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.
At the sentencing hearing 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.
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