‘Efficient and consistent with justice’: Judge offers inside look at Karmelo Anthony trial

Judge John Roach Jr., the veteran Collin County judge who presided over the closely watched Karmelo Anthony murder trial that ended in a guilty verdict this week, believes the teen received a fair trial and hopes the families believe justice was served. 

In an interview Friday with The Dallas Morning News, Roach offered a behind-the-scenes look into a trial that drew widespread misinformation, waves of racist rhetoric and sparked intense protests outside the courthouse. 

Long before opening statements began June 4, Roach began preparing for what would become one of the most closely watched trials of his career.

At a rainy high school track meet in Frisco last April, Karmelo Anthony fatally stabbed Austin Metcalf in the chest. Both were 17. Metcalf died in his twin brother’s arms, surrounded by fellow student-athletes and coaches.

The jury convicted Anthony of murder on Tuesday and sentenced him to 35 years in prison. The case ignited a racially charged debate, bringing high-tension protests to the Collin County courthouse almost every day of the five-day trial. Anthony is Black. Metcalf was white. 

For Roach, the presence of so many teenage witnesses shaped his approach. It raised a central concern that guided many pre-trial decisions: protection.

“A major group of people I wanted to protect are the students who witnessed this tragedy,” Roach said. “How do I isolate those kids, so we don’t have to make this tragic event more tragic than it already was?”

With two decades on the bench and nearly 40,000 cases handled, Roach said his experience prepared him for the demands of this trial. 

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One of the first steps was issuing a gag order, which prohibited public statements about the case outside of the courtroom. He also prohibited journalists from publishing the names of juvenile witnesses.

Roach implemented other rules, including limiting the number of seats in the courtroom for media and sticking with his longstanding practice of not allowing cameras.

“Watching court cases on TV, you can tell that cameras change people, that makes them nervous,” Roach said. “They make people act differently, and that includes the judge, it includes the lawyers, it includes the witnesses and everybody else surrounding it.”

As lawyers winnowed the pool of 600 potential jurors down to the 12-person panel that would decide the case, they wound up with a jury that included no Black people, sparking criticism from Anthony’s defense team and observers. Roach had sided with the prosecution when they moved to strike three Black jurors. 

“I really didn’t pay attention to it, because that’s not the job, to manufacture some look or makeup of a jury, but I thought it was a good cross section of Collin County,” he said.  

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The trial lasted five days and included testimony from about 30 witnesses. Anthony did not testify in his own defense. That, and the pace of the trial, attracted criticism. Roach said the trial was “efficient,” and said questions about the defense’s strategy weren’t fair.

“A lot of people question the strategy of lawyers in any case, and I don’t think that’s fair. They haven’t spoken to their clients, they haven’t seen all the evidence, they don’t know all the ins and outs of a case,” he said. “What we were was efficient and consistent with justice, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

In the year leading up to the trial, racial strife and misinformation from across the country spread on social media. 

Roach said he avoided reading or watching coverage of the trial to preserve impartiality. 

Outside the courthouse, supporters of both families gathered almost every day of the trial. The protests got intense, with white supremacists shouting at Anthony supporters, and protesters shoving each other as news of the guilty verdict spread.

Roach said he remained unaware of what was happening outside the courthouse. Roach had jurors and the Anthony and Metcalf families enter the courthouse through a separate entrance to avoid the scene, and the judge did the same.

“Every once in a while, I would ask the sheriff’s office or somebody from their office, ‘Is everything OK’, and they would say, ‘Everything’s fine, Judge,’” Roach said. 

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Roach, who plans to retire in December after two decades on the bench, said this case will stand out among the thousands he’s overseen.

“I hope that Austin Metcalf’s family thinks that their son got a fair trial, being the victim of this horrible crime,” he said. “And equally, I hope the Anthonys believe that their son got a fair trial at the end of the day.”

Amid continued protests and online attacks after the trial’s close, Roach said he believes the case was handled fairly. 

“I want to tell the public from my perspective that we desperately wanted a fair trial to happen, and we did everything we could to give him that fair trial, and I can say 100% that we did,”  he said.