Closing Arguments in the Karmelo Anthony Case

hotair.com

Yesterday, after calling just a few witnesses, the defense in the Karmelo Anthony trial rested its case. 

There was some kind of delay after lunch which lasted for about 90 minutes and there was speculation that Anthony might be deciding whether or not to testify in his own behalf. But after the delay, there was no clear explanation and Anthony did not testify. The judge said closing arguments would take place this morning and that the case would be given to the jury after that. 

Advertisement

Before starting on closing arguments today, the judge worked out instructions which would later be given to the jury. There were several disagreements about those instructions.

Judge overruled defense objection and another objection that the jury charge will not include criminally negligent homicide as a possible lesser offense.

But the big change came when the judge agreed to allow the jury to consider manslaughter as a charge.

This seems like a real gift to the defense because it means the jury can convict Anthony (which seems like a foregone conclusion at this point) without sending him to prison for the rest of his life. I'm not suggesting the circumstances support manslaughter in this case, only that a sympathetic jury might look at this now-19-year-old and look for a way to give him a break, regardless of what the law might dictate. Obviously we'll have to wait to see if the jury takes that path.

Yesterday it wasn't clear how long the closing arguments might be but today the judge gave each side 35 minutes. The prosecution declined to go first which meant the defense attorney spoke first. J.D. Miles from CBS 11 recounts the defense's closing argument.

Advertisement

“Austin Metcalf had no legal right to use force to eject Karmelo Anthony from that tent”

“He had no legal right to put his hands on Karmelo…Karmelo is in a public place”

“We ask you this incredibly tough task which is to follow the law”

“The government wants to make this case about Melo could have just left”

“You heard that a track event is a social event, it was completely common for kids to be milling about and go by and say hi, stop into the tent”

“We know that it was raining, i don’t know why we had to have this argument about whether it was raining”

“We know how Texas weather is, so it’s easy to think, boy i better get out of this rain”

He says a witness testified “we had no problem with him under the tent while it was raining”

“You have to put yourself in his (Karmelo’s) shoes, so you start under that tent, you want to get out of the rain”

“Sure enough one of the people at Memorial says, yea, come on over”

“Then all of the sudden Hunter Metcalf, or Austin say who are you? You need to leave?”

“These guys are much bigger than you, do you turn your back and walk away and take a chance that these teenage boys with their raging hormones”

“Austin and Hunter had the right to tell Melo to leave but they did have the right to use deadly force to make him leave”

“Melo had an absolute right to defend himself against that”

“How do you know in a split second of chaos when it’s too late”

“Because if you wait too late to defend yourself self defense is meaningless”

There's more but I'm just going to say that there doesn't seem to be much evidence that Hunter Metcalf played much of a role here. I think there was some testimony that he was initially scrolling on his phone under another part of the tent. Also, there's no evidence that "raging hormones" played a role. It was Karmelo Anthony who kept escalating this by refusing to leave when asked and then saying "F**k y'all" and calling them "p**sies." It was Anthony who allegedly challenged Austin to a fight. It was Anthony who put his hand in a bag, suggesting he had a weapon concealed there. It was Anthony who issued the challenge "Touch me and see what happens." At least one person, testified that Austin Metcalf responded calmly and even said "I'm not going to fight you at a track meet." 

Advertisement

If hormones were raging, they were almost exclusively coming from Karmelo Anthony. Anthony did have the right to defend himself. What he didn't have the right to do was escalate from a shove to stabbing someone in the chest with a knife.

The defense wasn't done:

“We heard a lot of differing accounts from the kids who were under that tent, i know its obvious but let me just say it, every single one was a Memorial kid, we should be on guard for having a bias because of course they would, Austin was their leader”

“So we heard a very jumbled account of what really happened in that tent”

"It was a shove, it was a hit, it was a lineman drill”

 On Anthony leaving the scene,

“Not exactly escaping like the guilty do, Melo had every opportunity to go right out that exit”

“We heard about Melo’s emotions, every single person who saw him down on that track said he was crying”

“What did he say? Melo said, ‘he’s not gonna die’, it’s clear he thought he stabbed him a place that he was not going to die”

Austin reportedly said to Karmelo according to a witness

“If you don’t move i’ll beat your ass”

‘As much as we may not like it, even a 17yo kid can legally have a 5 and ½ knife, even in a high school stadium, yes it’s a violation of policy but it is not a crime”

“Texas law doesn’t not require that you wait until you get hit”

“So ask yourself, has the government ruled out reasonable doubt when you put yourself in Melo shoes under that tent?”

All of the testimony is from Memorial High students because it was their tent. No other students were present because people didn't normally plop down under another team's tent.

Most witnesses described what Austin did as a shove and some said it was a soft or moderate shove, not a hard one. I don't think anyone testified it was a punch except the one defense witness who admitted he was a few dozen yards away and wasn't sure what he'd seen.

Advertisement

Similarly, the "If you don't move I'll beat your ass" line was the testimony of only one witness who argued with the defense on the stand saying he'd previously said it was something like that but not those exact words. No one else heard anything like that. As mentioned above, at least one person said Austin Metcalf declined to fight.

Here's a bit more from NBC DFW:

"Is it reasonable to worry these kids might jump in, that Hunter might pop in to defend his brother?" Howard asked.

Howard then began to address motive, saying that Karmelo had no motive other than that he felt he was in danger.

"It doesn't mean he came to the tent to provoke a fight," Howard said. "Why would he provoke a fight against a guy who's much bigger than him?" He went on to say that there was no reason for animosity between the two boys and that they did not know each other.

"There is no evidence Karmelo did anything but really think he was defending himself in that split second of chaos," Howard said...

Before concluding, Howard reminded the jury that they must put themselves in Karmelo's shoes.

"Hold the government to its burden," Howard said. "Have they ruled out every possible reasonable doubt? I submit to you they haven't."

He did provoke a fight by repeatedly refusing to leave and cursing at the students under the tent. 

There is no reasonable doubt that he killed Austin Metcalf because he admitted it. There is no reasonable doubt that this was not justified self-defense because no one had threatened to harm Anthony and no one else was armed. The defense argument here is literally that a group of teens were about to gang up and murder him but there's zero evidence to support that from anyone.

Next up was the prosecution's closing argument given by Bill Wirskye:

On Karmelo’s touch me comment

“Do not let them turn threat into a warning”

“You heard the testimony, you know it was a threat it wasn’t a warning”

On defense testimony that austin could have stabbed himself

“That’s ludicrous”

“What should be important is mindset, he took a knife to a track meet”

“He was going to come out on top of any hostile encounter”

“That’s mindset”

“This is one of those rare cases where every important fact can be boiled down to one sentence, you do not get to meet a shove with a stab, especially if you provoke the shove”

“It’s crystal clear, the facts are simple, you don’t get to meet a shove with a stab, especially if you provoke the shove”

“They said he was confused because the twins were coming at him, again trying to turn the threat into a warning”

“There was no fuse on this thing, they went from zero to a hundred like that”

“Thank goodness we have the video, the video tells the story”

“Why didn’t he just not walk away?” 

“You see had a choice to walk away and abandon the encounter”

Advertisement

He addressed the manslaughter option and, hopefully, ruled it out as a reasonable alternative here.

On whether manslaughter would apply in this case instead of murder

“If you think AM impaled himself on Karmelo Anthony’s knife, find him guilty of manslaughter”

On witnesses 

“They all said Karmelo Anthony provoked it”

Why self defense doesn’t apply

“You can meet deadly force with deadly force in Texas, but you can’t meet force, a shove, with deadly force, a stab”

“Size differential, it doesn’t work in this case, you don’t get to kill someone just because they are bigger than you”

“Self defense has to be a reasonable belief, a reasonable belief means a belief that would held by an ordinary and prudent person in the same situation as the defendant”

“It has to be immediately necessary, where was the immediate necessity to plunge a knife into an unarmed, young man”

“It’s not self defense folks, it’s murder, murder, plain and simple”

“No one’s standing up, no one’s surrounding Karmelo Anthony”

“The Memorial kids hadn’t turned on him, the video was so, so important, you can see with your own eyes, how normal that day was”

“At some point when he reached into the bag he opened it and had it ready to go”

“Did Austin Metcalf have defensive wounds, no. He never saw it coming”

“If this case was really about a young man trying to stay out of the rain, get under the bleachers”

On why he ran for an exit instead of a coach

“It’s a guilty, guilty mindset”

“He touched me, he did this, he did that…what would he have said if he was really confronted by both of the twins, his words alone belie the fact that this was one on one, this was not a mob of Memorial kids”

Reciting a witness who testified about Karmelo’s behavior 

“He had it in his mind what he was going to do”

That's a great point about Anthony's spontaneous statements after the murder. He never said "they attacked me" or "they came at me." What he said was "he touched me." There was no group threat, just one unarmed kid who pushed him. And here's the final part of the prosecution's close.

Advertisement

“I’m not going to fight you, Austin says multiple times,”

On the one witness who knew about Austin and Karmelo

“It wasn’t a hard push it was a small shove”

“Karmelo Anthony was trying to prove that he could do a violent act, well he sure did folks, he sure did”

“All told you the exact same thing, it’s not self defense, Austin didn’t want to fight”

“It’s a tragedy for everyone involved, and there’s a lot of truth in that outside this courtroom.”

“It’s not a tragedy for Karmelo Anthony, it’s a tragedy because of the decisions he made”

“It is senseless that AM lost his life on a Wednesday morning at a high school track meet”

“We don’t take weapons to school events, but he did”

“Ultimately this case is about accountability, what kind of community do you want to live in?”

“You represent the community today, as unpleasant as it may be it’s your duty to follow your oath and hold this young man accountable for this senseless, senseless murder.”

“I beg you to make justice swift in this case.”

Here are the judge's instructions:

Deliberations started around 10:50 am CDT, which means they probably have an hour to work before a lunch break. I really do think we should have a verdict by 3 pm local time.

But you never know with juries. It only takes one confused person to throw the whole process off track.

Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.

Help us fight back against the Democrats and Soros-backed DAs that refuse to enforce our laws to hold criminals accountable. Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.