The system failed Karmelo Anthony — he stabbed someone to death and is going to jail for it.
If this doesn’t strike you as an injustice, you haven’t been paying attention to the voices defending the 19-year-old who was just sentenced to 35 years in prison for murdering another teenager at a high school track meet in Texas two years ago.
The case has garnered national attention entirely for its racial angle. Anthony is black, and his victim, Austin Metcalf, was white.
But there is no evidence that race played a role in the incident, and if both young men had been white or both black, no one would try to pile political or social meaning on top of a senseless crime.
Both Anthony and Metcalf were football players who competed in track and attended different high schools.
At the meet, Anthony went inside the tent set up for Metcalf’s school. Athletes don’t ordinarily go into the tents of competing schools, and Metcalf and others asked him to leave.
He refused and told Metcalf, threateningly, “Touch me and see what happens.”
Metcalf shoved him, and Anthony responded by plunging a knife into Metcalf’s chest, killing him nearly instantly.
At the trial, Anthony’s defense tried to make a self-defense case. But Metcalf obviously didn’t represent a threat to Anthony’s life.
If Anthony had answered the shove with a shove of his own — or, better yet, simply left the tent when asked — the scuffle would have been quickly broken up, and Metcalf would be alive today and Anthony a free man.
Rather than simply admit that a black kid killed a white kid for no reason, Anthony’s defenders have reached for any reason to try to absolve him.
The rabble-rousing Democratic congresswoman from Texas, Jasmine Crockett, has said that the knife was small, so it can’t really be considered a deadly weapon — never mind that the knife did, indeed, kill Metcalf.
She’s said that Anthony only stabbed Metcalf once, which is irrelevant since it took only one thrust of the knife to kill him.
And she’s said that Anthony was justified in stabbing Metcalf because Metcalf was a large football player, but Anthony, too, was a football player, although not as big.
We’ve heard again and again that an all-white jury convicted Anthony, when there were minorities on the jury, just not blacks.
This complaint amounts to saying that it’s unfair that Anthony was denied the possibility that a black juror might dismiss the facts of the case and deadlock the jury for racial reasons (some of Anthony’s advocates say that in future such cases prospective black jurors should be less honest about their biases so they don’t get struck during jury selection).
The celebrity rapper Cardi B has opined that black kids now need to be told not to argue with white kids because it’s too dangerous.
This, though, fails to account for the fact that Anthony, not Metcalf, did the stabbing.
Besides, if the incident had merely been an argument, it would have been of no consequence.
It was Anthony’s use of deadly force that instantly transformed it into something life-changing.
If you didn’t know anything about the case, you’d believe, listening to the pro-Anthony commentary, that he was the one killed.
His advocate, the progressive Minister Dominique Alexander, says the case shows that black lives don’t matter; this charge at least makes some intuitive sense when a black man has been shot by a cop, but to apply it to a case where a black kid stabbed a white kid is mind-bogglingly perverse.
It’d be much better if such cases were simply considered on their merits.
There is no reason to make an open-and-shut murder case into a race-based morality play, and consider the perpetrator and victim racial symbols rather than actual people, whose conduct should be judged by neutral standards.
Karmelo Anthony committed a shocking crime, and his race can’t mitigate it or free him of responsibility.
X: @RichLowry
