Corcoran was found guilty of the 1997 murders of his brother, his sister's fiancé, and two of their friends at his house in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and he was sentenced to death in 1999.

[1] Born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on April 18, 1975, Joseph Edward Corcoran grew up in Hamilton, where he lived with his parents, two sisters, and one brother, before they moved to Ball Lake in Steuben County.

[2] Corcoran, who went to Hamilton Junior-Senior High School during his adolescent years, reportedly did not have a good relationship with his parents, who he believed were too strict with him.

At around 8.30am, Corcoran's parents were found dead inside their Ball Lake home at Steuben County, Indiana, sustaining wounds caused by a shotgun.

He allegedly believed they were too strict with him, had sold a car he thought would belong to him, burned his music tapes, and made him go to church.

[5] On November 16, 1992, after a five-day trial, Corcoran was acquitted after the jury found insufficient evidence to convict him of the murders of his parents.

[7][8] During the next five years after his acquittal, Corcoran, who never completed his high school education, went to live with his siblings, who helped him find various jobs, including as a dishwasher and cook.

They were unable to decide on his guilt since the evidence was all circumstantial, and there was an absence of direct witnesses and murder weapons, which made the jury opt for a verdict of not guilty.

[9] On July 26, 1997, five years after allegedly killing his parents, Joseph Corcoran committed the quadruple murder of his brother and three other men.

[10] According to court and media sources, James, his friends, and Turner were together in the living room, watching television and eating pizza.

Before he did so, Corcoran took his seven-year-old niece into an upstairs bedroom to protect her from the gunfire and then loaded a semi-automatic rifle and moved to the living room with the weapon.

The offense of murder with aggravating circumstances carries the death penalty or life in prison under Indiana state law.

[22][23] On August 26, 1999, Corcoran was sentenced to death for all four counts of murder by Allen County Superior Judge Fran Gull.

On September 5, 2002, the Indiana Supreme Court affirmed the decision of Justice Gull to re-instate the death penalty in Corcoran's case and rejected his appeal.

[33][34] On December 31, 2008, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals allowed the death sentence to stand in Corcoran's case, after they accepted the appeal of the prosecution and cited that Corcoran's rights were not violated since it was constitutionally permissible for Gevers to pursue a harsher punishment irrespective to the presence or absence of a plea deal and bench trial.

Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Corcoran's death sentence to be overturned and a new re-sentencing trial should be granted, after finding that the original trial judge had improperly considered aggravating factors not set out in state law,[40][41] but the death penalty was once again restored for Corcoran on November 12, 2010, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the 7th U.S.

[50] By January 2014, Corcoran was one of the 11 death row inmates awaiting execution in Indiana, not including Debra Brown, the female accomplice of serial killer Alton Coleman, who was serving a life sentence in Ohio despite receiving the death penalty in Indiana state jurisdiction (which was later commuted in 2018).

Describing the 1997 Fort Wayne murders as "an unspeakable tragedy took the lives of four people who unquestionably deserved to live", the lawyers argued that Corcoran's death sentence should not be carried out on the grounds that he had been mentally ill, and suffered from paranoid schizophrenia for the past several years, and they revealed that Corcoran's symptoms persisted while on death row, including his delusions of being tortured daily by prison guards with an ultrasound machine, his conversations with people whom he saw only in his hallucinations, and his delusions of having an involuntary speech disorder.

The opposition to the state's lethal injection protocols was another ground of appeal by Corcoran's counsel to oppose the approval of his death warrant.

[58][59][60] On September 11, 2024, the Indiana Supreme Court approved the death warrant of Corcoran, scheduling him to be executed before dawn on December 18, 2024.

[68] On October 25, 2024, Corcoran's counsel appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court to overturn a previous ruling that barred him from seeking post-conviction relief in state courts, which was issued due to Corcoran failing to meet the deadline nearly two decades ago in seeking post-conviction review.

[74] At the same time, Bob Morris, a state politician, asked to delay the execution of Corcoran and submitted a petition to repeal the death penalty.

In a majority decision of 3–2, the judges found that the lawyers did not submit new evidence to prove that Corcoran was mentally incompetent for execution and this issue was repeatedly litigated for years, but the courts did not accept these claims.

In the majority judgement, the concurring judges took into consideration that Corcoran had earlier emphasized in his personal letter that he did not wish to pursue further pleas for reprieve and he had also asked the courts to not allow his counsel's attempt to stop the execution.

The majority judgement also detailed that Corcoran was being found mentally competent in prior psychiatric tests and therefore, they chose to uphold the death sentence.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita, in his own media statement, stated that Corcoran "finally paid his debt to society as justice was provided to his victims.