“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.”
The jury has begun deliberating in the trial of Karmelo Anthony, who has been charged with the fatal stabbing of Austin Metcalf at a Texas track meet in 2025.
During closing arguments that were delivered on Tuesday morning, defense attorney Mike Howard said that "Austin Metcalf had no legal right to use force to eject Karmelo Anthony from that tent." Anthony, who was on a different track team, had been under the tent of Memorial High School, whose team Metcalf was on.
"He had no legal right to put his hands on Karmelo," Howard said, per CBS News. "Karmelo is in a public place." He asked the jury to put themselves in Anthony’s shoes, saying, "You want to get out of the rain ... Sure enough, one of the people at Memorial says, 'yeah, come on over.'" He added, "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 with these teenage boys with their raging hormones?"
"Austin and Hunter had the right to tell Melo to leave, but they did not have the right to use deadly force to make him leave," Howard said. "Melo had an absolute right to defend himself against that."
Howard also questioned the bias of the Memorial High School students who testified that Anthony had been the aggressor, saying, "I know it's 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."
Prosecutor Bill Wirskye told the jury, "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." He added, "Why didn't [Anthony] just not walk away? You see had a choice to walk away and abandon the encounter."
"You can meet deadly force with deadly force in Texas, but you can't meet force, a shove, with deadly force, a stab," he said. "Size differential, it doesn't work in this case, you don't get to kill someone just because they are bigger than you."
He explained why he believes the argument of self-defense doesn’t hold up: "Self-defense has to be a reasonable belief, a reasonable belief means a belief that would be 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?" Wirskye said. "It's not self-defense folks, it's murder. Murder, plain and simple."
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