There was a moment during Molly Martens’s sentencing hearing for the voluntary manslaughter of her husband, Jason Corbett, when doubts about her villainy got a revivifying blast of oxygen. It was the day Dr Bill Smock, a police surgeon testifying at the behest of her defence lawyers, pronounced that Margaret “Mags” Fitzpatrick, the dead man’s first wife, had probably died of asphyxiation, the common cause of which, he said, was strangulation. Smock’s conjecture made international news.
It was hard to escape reports of this sensational courtroom development that purported to contradict the official cause of the young mother’s death in Limerick in 2006 as an asthma attack. The news spouted from radios and televisions wherever you went, whether in your kitchen or the corner shop, in a taxi or the lunchtime sandwich queue. On hearing it, the casual listener might have surmised that maybe the father and daughter who battered Jason Corbett to death in his North Carolina home were telling the truth after all when they claimed they had killed him in self-defence in August 2015. Suddenly, Molly Martens’s allegations that she had been an abused wife seemed to assume a complexion of plausibility.
That moment of doubt was soon dispelled when Smock’s speculation was not supported by another expert witness. Dr William Bozeman, a professor of emergency medicine called by the prosecution, told the court in North Carolina that he could not say homicide was the “probable” cause of the first Mrs Corbett’s death in 2006. Mags Fitzpatrick’s birth family subsequently made a statement to the court confirming that she had long suffered from asthma and that her sister, Catherine, had been present when Jason rushed her to hospital on the night she died. “He revived her in the car. He did everything he could to save this person he adored,” they said.
The judge, in his wisdom, rejected Martens’s allegation – made privately to Jason’s young child – that he had killed Mags. The judge concluded that cardiac arrest was a more probable cause of her death.
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Most egregious of all was that the two children born to Mags and Jason were subjected to their step-mother’s calumnies in the courtroom as they waited to testify that she had coached them to lie to police investigating their father’s death
But the damage was done. By then, all of Ireland’s national news outlets had reported Martens’s false accusations that Jason was a violent, controlling, drink-soused wife-abuser. Molly Martens’s aspersions about her husband were faithfully reported further afield, by international media networks such as ABC, Fox and the BBC, as well as local US newspapers and the glossy women’s magazine, Elle.
Most egregious of all was that the two children born to Mags and Jason were subjected to their stepmother’s calumnies in the courtroom as they waited to testify that she had coached them to lie to police investigating their father’s death. First, Molly Martens and her father, Thomas, made the children orphans by bludgeoning their last surviving parent to death with a paving brick and a baseball bat. Then they coldly assassinated his reputation. The final vestige his children had left to cling to was his memory and his killers did their damnedest to obliterate that too.
In setting the Martens’s remaining custodial sentence at between seven and 23 months, the judge allowed them mitigation for Thomas Martens’s past public service in the FBI. No account was taken of the aggravating factor of the Martens pair piling vilification upon their victim. The unfairness of this is grotesque.
Mitigation in sentencing happens in Ireland too. If a convicted person has obviated the need for a full trial by pleading guilty or has demonstrated some contrition, these factors can lessen the sentence for most crimes. The crime of murder is excluded because the sentence is mandatorily for life, though in practice in Ireland, that usually means 12 years before the convict’s first parole hearing.
Many jurisdictions provide discretion for judges to ensure longer sentences in certain landmark criminal cases, as happened last August when an English nurse, Lucy Letby, was sentenced for the whole of her life for murdering seven babies in the hospital where she worked.
The law rightly recognises that accused persons are entitled to defend themselves and that their ability to do so should not be constrained
The smearing of victims’ reputations by those accused of killing them is not peculiar to America’s law courts. Gerald Barry is an Irish case in point. He was unanimously found guilty of murdering Manuela Riedo, a Swiss teenager, in Galway in 2007 after he had sought to denigrate her while her heartbroken parents listened in court. Barry was given a life sentence and another five years for stealing Manuela’s phone and camera. He did not get a minute extra for having raped her or for sullying her reputation in his pathetic attempt to get away with her murder.
The dead girl had no voice in that courtroom where her killer enjoyed a full right of audience for his lies about her. Fortunately, he failed to convince even one of the jurors that his victim was the sort of girl who would encounter a stranger perchance on a dark night and lie down there and then and have consensual sex with him. Yet his despicable lies endure on the public record and in the public mind.
The law rightly recognises that accused persons are entitled to defend themselves and that their ability to do so should not be constrained. Thus the jury in the Riedo trial was not told that Barry had previously killed a man, blinded a different man and raped another young woman. The law also recognises that any aspect of mitigation should be rewarded by judges determining the sentence. Had Manuela survived Barry’s attack and had he pleaded guilty to raping her, his sentence would have been shortened on the assumption that he had saved her the ordeal of a trial.
In Irish law, one cannot libel the dead – unless a case has been instituted while the person was still alive – and one cannot be sued for libel over anything said in a court of law under the protection of privilege. If mitigation is proper in setting sentences – and it is – aggravation should be considered too.
Currently, the double indemnity enjoyed by convicted criminals, in contrast with the silenced voices of their victims, so unbalances the scales of justice as to render the law inadequate in vindicating victims’ rights.