Anthony Edward Martin (16 December 1944 – 2 February 2025) was an English farmer who shot at two burglars in his home on 20 August 1999. One burglar died at the scene and the other escaped injured. There was sympathy for Martin from people who supported the right to defend their own homes, but prosecutors cast doubt on his evidence and pointed out that he did not have a valid firearms certificate. He was convicted of murder, which was later reduced to manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility, and served three years in prison after being denied parole.

Martin was born in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire on 16 December 1944. Part of a prosperous farming family, he attended private schools in Norfolk and Oxfordshire. At school, although a successful sportsman, he was not academically gifted. Aged 17, he left school and started travelling, working on Australian farms and as a steward on ocean liners. He also worked on Scottish oil rigs, but eventually returned to the family farm to run a piggery. In 1979 he inherited Bleak House, a Victorian property near Emneth Hungate, from an aunt and uncle.

Martin lived alone at his farmhouse, Bleak House, in Emneth Hungate, Norfolk. He claimed that he had been burgled 10 times over the years, losing £6,000 worth of furniture, though police stated they were unsure whether all of the incidents actually occurred. He also complained about police inaction over the burglaries and claimed that multiple items and furniture were stolen, including dinnerware and a grandfather clock. Martin had equipped himself with an illegally held pump-action Winchester Model 1300 12-bore shotgun, which he claimed to have found.

Changes in legislation in 1988, resulting from the Hungerford massacre, had changed the licensing treatment of semiautomatic and pump-action shotguns with a magazine capacity of more than two to equate to that of a firearm, requiring a valid firearms certificate. Martin had his shotgun certificate revoked in 1994 after he found a man stealing apples in his orchard and shot a hole in the back of his vehicle.

Twenty-nine-year-old Brendon Fearon and 16-year-old Fred Barras, burglars from Newark-on-Trent, broke into Martin's house on the evening of 20 August 1999. Shooting downwards in the dark with his shotgun loaded with birdshot, Martin shot three times towards the intruders, once when they were in the stairwell and twice more when they were trying to flee through the window of an adjacent ground floor room. Barras was hit in the back and both sustained gunshot injuries to their legs. Both escaped through the window, but Barras died at the scene. Martin claimed that he opened fire after being woken when the intruders smashed a window. The prosecution accused him of lying in wait for the burglars and opening fire without warning from close range, in retribution for previous break-ins at his home.

On 10 January 2000, Fearon and 33-year-old Darren Bark (who had acted as the getaway driver), also from Newark-on-Trent, admitted to conspiring to burgle Martin's farmhouse.^{[citation needed]} Fearon was sentenced to three years in prison, and Bark to two and a half years (with an additional 12 months arising from previous offences). Fearon was released on 10 August 2001. Barras had already been convicted of a total of 29 offences by the time of his death at the age of 16, including assault, seven convictions for theft and six for fraud. He had been sentenced to two months in a young offenders' institution for assaulting a police officer, theft and being drunk and disorderly. On the night he was killed, Barras had just been released on bail after being accused of stealing garden furniture. His grandmother, Mary Dolan, said: "It's not fair that the farmer has got all the money and he is the one that took Fred away."

On 23 August 1999, Martin was charged with the murder of Barras, the attempted murder of Fearon, "wounding with intent to cause injury" to Fearon and "possessing a firearm with intent to endanger life". Martin did not hold a valid shotgun certificate, let alone the more restrictive firearms certificate he would have needed to possess the Winchester pump-action shotgun that held a maximum of five rounds. There was sympathy for Martin from people who supported the right to defend their own homes, but prosecutors cast doubt on his evidence.

English law at the time permitted a person to kill another in self-defence only if the person defending themself uses no more than "reasonable force"; it is the responsibility of the jury to determine whether or not an unreasonable amount of force was used. The jury at the trial were told that they had the option of returning a verdict of manslaughter rather than murder, if they thought that Martin "did not intend to kill or cause serious bodily harm". However, the jurors found Martin guilty of murder by a 10 to 2 majority.