The Jason Corbett manslaughter case in North Carolina has been shown video recordings of his children recounting scenes of domestic violence, in which they said their father physically and verbally abused his second wife Molly Martens Corbett.
The two children, who were then aged eight and ten, were interviewed four days after Mr Corbett was beaten to death at his home in 2015.
The statements were later rescinded when they returned to Ireland and prosecution lawyers are due to give evidence on the statements later today.
Tom Martens and his daughter, Martens Corbett, have pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges, in return for prosecutors dropping murder charges against them. The plea deal avoids the need for a full retrial.
That retrial was ordered by the North Carolina Appeals Court, which quashed the original murder convictions because the evidence of the children's interviews had been excluded from the first trial.
This ruling was later upheld by the state supreme court, which said the exclusion of the children’s interviews "impermissibly constrained the defendants’ ability to mount their defence".
It described the content of the interviews as being relevant and material to the jury in its role as a finder of fact.
That evidence has now been presented to the court hearing in Lexington, which is considering submissions in advance of sentencing.
The interviews took place at Dragonfly House Children's Advocacy Centre in Mocksville, North Carolina, a specialist facility for assessing child abuse victims.
At the time of the interviews, four days after the killing of Mr Corbett, the two children were being cared for by Martens Corbett and her mother Sharon Martens.
In her interview, then eight-year-old Sarah said her father would get angry and would shout at Martens Corbett if, for example, lights were left on in a room that was empty, or when bills arrived.
When asked about her parents fighting, she said: "My dad was always the one who started it. Say if the lights were on in the bathroom, he would get really angry with mom."
The young girl said he got angry "every day, or most likely twice a day". She said Mr Corbett would call his wife frequently during the day, and on one occasion, he had called her mobile phone 47 times.
She said she knew this because her brother had scrolled through Martens Corbett's phone and saw the missed calls.
The social worker conducting the interview asked if Mr Corbett would hurt his wife. The young girl said: "No".
But she said she did see him step on her foot, which she said "might have been accidental, but I don’t think so".
Earlier, the court had heard that Martens Corbett had a clump of veins in her left foot that put pressure on a nerve. The girl said she also saw her father pull Martens Corbett's hair. She said she saw him hit her once and pointed to her face. "He called her a bad name," she said.
Sarah told the interviewer that when she was six, Martens Corbett had told her that "your dad isn’t that good of a dad".
Asked about her father's drinking, she said he drank beer. Asked if he drank every day, she said "no" and that he only drank beer with his friends or at a party.
Asked if anyone had told her what to say in the interview, Sarah replied: "No."
Martens Corbett told son she hit Corbett with brick
Jack Corbett, then aged ten, said he had been told of his father's death by a police officer at 4.52am. The time had stuck in his mind, he said, adding that he felt angry and upset.
He said he was told that his father had "gotten so angry that Grandpa (Martens) had hit him with a bat, and Mom (Martens Corbett) hit him with a brick". Asked how he knew she had hit Mr Corbett with a brick, he said: "She told me."
Asked about violence in the home, he said Mr Corbett would physically and verbally hurt Martens Corbett. He said on one occasion he was woken up by noise, went out and saw his father punch her in the face.
On another occasion, he witnessed a row over a mobile phone. He said his father grabbed the phone off his wife and pushed her away. She pushed him back, and he pushed her again, sending her to the ground.
He said his father "cussed" at her. Asked what she would do, he said: "She would cry and try to block her ears."
He said he started to notice the fights in the house when he was about five or six, and they had got worse over the years. He said his father had been getting a lot angrier in recent months.
Asked if his father was often drunk, Jack said: "No."
Both children said they had set up a codeword system with their grandmother, Ms Martens, with Jack to use the codeword "galaxy" and Sarah to say "peacock".
They were told that if there was serious trouble in the house, they were to ring their grandmother, say the codewords, and then hang up. That would be a signal for their grandmother to come over. She lived in Tennessee, which was a five-hour drive away.
Statements rescinded when children returned to Ireland
Prosecution lawyers told the judge the children had rescinded the statements they had made in Dragonfly House when they had returned to Ireland in 2015, and again in police interviews in 2021 in preparation for the retrial.
They are due to present evidence on the recanting of the statements to the sentencing hearing in more detail today.
Earlier, prosecutors played the entire video recording of Martens Corbett’s interview with police just hours after her husband had been killed on 2 August 2015.
In the recording, Martens Corbett says she was afraid of the Corbett family, and feared they would come over from Ireland to kill her and take his two children back to Ireland.
Interviewed by a female officer, Lieutenant Thompson, Martens Corbett is first asked to explain what had happened. She began by saying "we were fighting". This began a lengthy query about violence in the marriage. Asked how long it had been going on, Martens Corbett replied: "Forever."
Asked if she had ever been to a hospital with any injuries, she said she had been "a couple of times", but had never told anyone about what had happened at home.
She had visited a hospital a few months before the fatal attack on Mr Corbett, complaining of headaches and sought an MRI scan.
The doctors gave her painkillers and said it was a stress headache. A physical exam revealed no cuts or bruising on her head. She told police during the interview that Mr Corbett had slammed her head against the headboard of their bed.
Asked why she kept rubbing her neck in the interview room, Martens Corbett said that her neck hurt, and her throat was sore.
She said Mr Corbett had grabbed her by the throat while they were in bed, after Sarah had disturbed them because she was having a nightmare, and the couple were arguing about it.
She said he also put his arm around her neck and held her in front of himself when her father entered the room with a baseball bat, after she had started screaming.
She said Martens had hit Mr Corbett twice. She said Mr Corbett had let go of her and grabbed the baseball bat from Martens and shoved him to the floor. She said Mr Corbett "tried to hit dad, and missed, and I hit him (Jason) with a brick".
Martens Corbett then explained that Sarah had brought a paving brick from the garden some days earlier that they planned to paint and decorate as part of a garden project, but had not got around to doing it.
She said her father recovered the baseball bat from Mr Corbett and began hitting him. Asked how many times, she replied: "I don’t know."
She then became emotional and said: "I shouldn’t have screamed." The police officer said: "You were afraid – why wouldn’t you cry out for help?"
Martens Corbett explained that she was not the biological mother of the two children and they were not US citizens. She believed Mr Corbett could have removed them to Ireland at any time.
She also expressed her fear that the Corbett and Fitzgerald families, representing the biological parents, could go through social services to have the children transferred to Ireland and she would never see them. The police officer said that was "a legitimate concern".
She described taking the children to another doctor about some issues connected with stress in the home. She said she implied things were bad between her and Mr Corbett, but did not complain of any physical violence.
Police officer said 'Irish are known for drinking'
Lieutenant Thomspon then asked about Mr Corbett’s drinking. Martens Corbett said he had been drinking beer with a neighbour between 3.30pm and 8.30pm that evening.
Asked about Mr Corbett's demeanor she said he was drunk. Happy and drunk, but a little irritated because his parents-in-law had showed up a day earlier than expected.
The police officer who conducted the interview said: "The Irish people are known for drinking."
Lieutenant Thompson called in a police photographer to photograph marks on her neck and looked for other signs of physical damage on her body, notably on her hands and arms.
Later in the interview, Martens Corbett asked if she could go home after the interview, and if the house would be clean.
The officer said she could go there, but it would not be cleaned. She could give her the names of some "crime scene cleaning companies", but they probably would not be able to clean up for a day or two.
Lieutenant Thompson then informed Martens Corbett that her husband did not survive the assault on him. "I didn’t think so," she replied. Then she began crying.
After that she said she was scared of the Corbett family. Asked why, she said: "I am scared of the family – scared they will kill me and take the kids."
She then wrote out her statement for the police, having initially been reluctant to do so. When she finished writing, Lieutenant Thompson came back into the interview room and said the district attorney would decide what happens next, but that having talked to her and her father (Tom Martens) it sounded like self-defence.
Assistant District Attorney Kaitlin Jones told Judge David Hall to note that Martens Corbett clearly stated she had hit Mr Corbett on the head with a paving brick. She also said Martens Corbett had not confided in anybody that she was in a physically violent relationship with her husband.
Earlier, another Assistant DA, Marissa Parker, said Mr Corbett, in holding his wife in a neck-lock and putting her in front of himself, could be seen to have been acting in a defence, not a threatening, position when Martens entered the room with a baseball bat.
In this hearing, defence lawyers are presenting mitigating evidence to the court, while prosecutors maintain that whilst the defendants acted initially on the need for self-defence, the amount of force employed became excessive.
With the guilty pleas to manslaughter already agreed, Judge David Hall must decide on appropriate sentences.
They run in a range from supervised probation, if he finds extreme mitigating circumstances, to six to nine years in prison, if he finds an aggravating factor that outweighs the mitigating factors.
