The one thing that played no role in Karmelo Anthonys murder of Austin Metcalf

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 th...