What Karmelo Anthony’s appeal could look like — and why experts agree it’s unlikely to succeed

Experts agree Karmelo Anthony’s appeal of his murder conviction will likely be unsuccessful, despite various legal issues that may be raised in court surrounding the contentious trial. 

A Collin County jury sentenced 19-year-old Anthony to 35 years in prison last week, after he was found guilty of murdering 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a Frisco ISD track meet last year. Supporters of Anthony were quick to criticize the decision as unjust, and Anthony’s legal team filed a notice of appeal a day after the verdict. 

Anthony’s case is now making its way to the 5th Court of Appeals in Dallas, where appellate justices will review the trial proceedings to confirm or overturn the jury’s decision. But defense attorneys, a law professor, and a former criminal trial judge say the verdict is likely to stand, despite case elements that raised questions about the fairness of the proceedings.

“Appellate courts generally don’t like to disturb a jury verdict — that is almost sacred,” said Daryl Washington, a Dallas-based civil rights attorney not associated with the case. “But I will tell you, it was a difficult case.”

SMU law professor Eric Ruben agreed that appellate justices are likely to defer to the jury’s judgment on the facts of the case. 

“Appellate judges are especially disinclined to second-guess the fact determinations of juries,” SMU law professor Eric Ruben said. “They’re more likely to focus on legal problems in the sorts of decisions that the judge was making.”

Ruben said the appellate justices are likely to review the defense’s Batson challenge — a legal objection on the grounds that a lawyer excluded a potential juror on the basis of race, sex or ethnicity. 

Anthony’s team raised the objection after all Black prospective jurors were dismissed from the pool. District Judge John Roach Jr. allowed the jurors to be struck because the prosecution provided a race-neutral reason for their removal: all the Black jurors were educators. Anthony is Black. Metcalf was white.

“The question is going to be whether the race-neutral reason that the prosecutors gave for striking the remaining black prospective jurors was genuine, or whether it was pretextual,” Ruben said. 

David Finn, a former criminal trial judge and federal prosecutor who is not associated with the case, said he believed the removal was fair. 

“I think that that is a race-neutral reason, and I think the conviction will stand on appeal,” Finn said. 

But Washington said the decision to dismiss the defense’s challenge raises questions. 

“Both of the kids were high school students,” he said. “I have known teachers to be the most fair individuals I’ve ever dealt with — they’re about the facts, they would listen to both sides. So I need to know why were those three jurors struck.”

Beyond the jury selection, Finn said he believes the appeal will fail because Roach did his due diligence in presenting jurors with manslaughter and self-defense instructions during the trial. 

Roach also included a “sudden passion” instruction during the punishment phase to consider that Anthony could have acted impulsively because of intense emotion when approached by Metcalf. 

These instructions are meant to help the jury understand all of their legal options for a verdict and sentencing, effectively translating legal statutes and jargon into comprehensible language. 

“The judge erred on the side of caution and included all of that to make sure that the defendant did get a fair trial and it would stand up on appeal,” Finn said.  “The conviction, in my opinion, is rock solid.”

But Ruben said appellate judges may home in on one word — “provoke” — and whether Roach defined the term clearly in the jury instructions.

Texas law says that an individual loses the right to claim self-defense when they “provoked” the altercation “with the intent of creating a pretext for attacking the victim,” Ruben said. The self-defense argument became a critical part of the defense’s argument, with lawyers arguing Anthony stabbed Metcalf to defend himself. 

“When there’s a legal term of art — a technical term like ‘provoke’ in this context — that doesn’t have the same meaning in the law as it does in ordinary speech, there’s a risk that the jury would make an arbitrary decision on the basis of an incorrect understanding of the law,” he said. 

Ruben said appellate justices will likely review the case to ensure Roach properly defined the legal term for the jury. 

“Appellate courts can defer to what the jury concluded as to the facts, so that’s why one of the main things that you see in criminal appeals after jury trials is whether the judge got the law right,” Ruben said.
 
Regardless of the issues raised on appeal, Dallas-based criminal defense attorney Paul Saputo said very few criminal cases are successfully reversed on appeal in Texas — only about 4% of cases were fully reversed last year, according to the annual statistical report for the Texas Judiciary. The report shows that justices affirmed trial court’s rulings in nearly half of the cases they reviewed in 2024.

“It’s very hard to win an appeal as a defendant — it’s extremely rare for the Texas courts to overturn a criminal verdict,” said Saputo, who is not associated with the case,  He added that regardless of the appeal decision, he believes the case will end up in front of the Court of Criminal Appeals, Texas’ highest court for criminal matters. 

“This is going to be a long process,” said Washington, the civil rights attorney. “This is not going to be something that’s going to happen overnight.”