Father and daughter convicted of murder granted new trial.

Byline: Bill Cresenzo

A father and daughter who were convicted of second-degree murder in the beating death of the daughter's husband are entitled to a new trial because the trial court didn't allow into evidence statements from the husband's children about his violent temper, allowed expert testimony regarding ostensible blood stains that were never proven to actually be blood, and improperly instructed the jury about self-defense, a divided North Carolina Court of Appeals has ruled.

Tom Martens was in Davidson County in 2015 to visit his daughter, Molly Corbett, and her husband, Jason Corbett, when he awoke in the middle of the night to screaming and loud voices coming from Molly and Jason's room. Carrying a baseball bat he had brought as a gift for Jason's son, he went upstairs and found Jason choking Molly. A violent struggle ensued, with Jason dragging Molly in a chokehold as Martens hit him with the bat.

Martens testified that he threw the bat at Jason, allowing Molly to escape his grasp. Jason shoved Martens to the floor and grabbed the bat. Martens rushed him, got the bat back, and Molly hit Jason with a paving stone. Martens continued to strike his son-in-law with the bat several times until he fell down. Jason died at the scene.

Molly and Martens claimed self-defense, but a jury convicted them in 2017 of second-degree murder, and they were each sentenced to 20 to 25 years in prsion. In a Feb. 4 decision, a divided Court of Appeals panel overturned their convictions and ordered a new trial.

"This case is deceptively simple, boiling down to whether defendants lawfully used deadly force to defend themselves and each other during the tragic altercation with Jason," Judge Valerie Zachary wrote for the court's majority. "It is evident that this is the rare case in which certain evidentiary errors, alone and in the aggregate, were so prejudicial as to inhibit defendants' ability to present a full and meaningful defense."

Corbett and Martens argued that the trial judge, W. David Lee, had erred by excluding statements that Jason's two young children (from a previous marriage) had made right after their father died. By the time that Corbett and Martens went to trial, the children were living in Ireland with Jason's family and couldn't be subpoenaed to testify.

But the son had told a forensic interviewer from a children' advocacy center that his father often lost his temper and got angry with Corbett over minor issues, that he had seen his...