Thomas and Molly Martens plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter of Jason Corbett

Kenneth Fox

Thomas Martens has pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter of Limerick widower Jason Corbett at Davidson County Superior Court in North Carolina.

His daughter Molly, Mr Corbett’s second wife, entered a “no contest” plea to the same charge of voluntary manslaughter.

The case will resume later on Saturday as a sentencing hearing, which is expected to take between one and two weeks.

Prosecutor Alan Martin told the court that the plea agreement took months to negotiate and had only recently been fully resolved.

As the Irish Examiner reports, the pleas are to a lesser charge than that of second degree murder. The second degree murder charges were dropped on Monday.

The voluntary manslaughter conviction carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison, but only if there are extensive aggravating factors that are unlikely to come into play in this case.

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 and quietly watched the proceedings. Jack Corbett, who was aged 10 when his father died, and his sister Sarah, then 8, are now in their teens.

No interaction could be seen between the Corbett siblings and either of the defendants. After the death of his first wife and while the children were small, Jason Corbett hired Molly Martens 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 Martens on August 2nd, 2015.