McKINNEY, Texas (Court TV) — A teenager convicted of murdering another student at a track meet wants a new trial after his new defense team claims he was coerced into not testifying at his trial.
Karmelo Anthony (Texas Department of Criminal Justice via ABC News)
Karmelo Anthony, 19, was sentenced to 35 years in prison after he was found guilty of murdering 17-year-old Austin Metcalf when the two encountered one another at a track meet in April 2025. Anthony never denied plunging the knife into Metcalf’s torso, but had argued that he acted in self-defense when he felt threatened by the larger teen.
Anthony, now represented by new attorneys, filed a motion for a new trial on Tuesday, arguing first that he was denied his constitutional right to a fair and open trial when Judge John Roach limited public access. Ten months before the trial began, Roach issued a gag order in the case. Anthony’s defense argues the order was made “sua sponte and on no party’s motion,” and was never violated throughout the pendency of the case.
But the gag order was taken to such an extent that the entire pretrial proceedings were conducted out of public view, the defense said. Meetings addressing evidentiary issues, trial security and scheduling were all held in chambers and no pretrial hearing was ever held regarding the access restrictions. “The public docket discloses no motions in limine and none of the substantive pretrial litigation that in fact occurred — filings that were hand-delivered rather than filed in the District Clerk’s public record,” the motion states. “A member of the public who examined the docket before trial would have found no hearing to attend and nothing to read.”
As the trial approached the restrictions grew, and the entire courthouse campus was placed under a curfew, with designated restricted zones. Only nine members of the media were allowed into the trial each day; all audio, video and livestreaming of the trial were banned, and only a few dozen members of the public would have access to seats each day. Anthony was limited to having eight seats for family in the courtroom, meaning his grandfather and aunts were excluded and unable to view the trial; those who did come had to register one day in advance.
“The same off-the-record method that hid the pretrial proceedings from the public also produced the understanding on which the entire defense was built,” the defense said in its motion. In May 2026, the lead prosecutor “proposed the parties ‘try the case clean’ — ‘based only on what happened under the tent that day’ — with neither side offering character, reputation, or extraneous-conduct evidence concerning either the Metcalf twins or the Defendant.” The agreement itself was never written out. “To avoid media reporting on ‘bad act’ evidence, the understanding was memorialized only as a deliberately generic motion in limine, hand-delivered to the Court on the first day of trial; it does not appear on the public docket.”
Because of that agreement, the defense said it could not call an expert to explain how Anthony’s epilepsy affected his threat perception, or a forensic psychologist who would have addressed adolescent brain development and the fight-or-flight response. Under the agreement, Anthony planned to testify, but would only testify “to the altercation like any other tent witness, free of character impeachment, and the defense would present its self-defense case through him.”
All sides abided by the agreement — until the last day of evidence, the defense said in its motion. On June 8th, the prosecution suddenly announced that “the agreement had ‘never contemplated a testifying defendant’ and asserted that defense counsel had already ‘opened the door’ by mentioning in opening that the Defendant played chess, a position the Court itself rejected.” While rejecting the argument, the Court also found it had no legal mechanism to enforce the off-the-books understanding, “because it had been reached, and presented to the court, off the record — and that if the Defendant testified, the door to character and extraneous-offense evidence would almost certainly open.”
At that point, Anthony was given only 10 minutes to confer with his lawyers to decide whether to testify. He did not take the stand. “By then, it was too late to conduct a different voir dire, deliver a different opening, or re-cross the State’s witnesses; and as punishment, the defense case was reduced to three pre-approved questions of the Defendant’s mother.”
While seeking a new trial, Anthony’s attorneys want Roach recused from hearing the motion. Two days after handing down the jury’s 35-year sentence, Roach appeared on WFAA for an interview in which he discussed the case. Among the statements that Anthony’s defense described in the motion as “problematic” was Roach’s response to the question of whether the jury got it right: “Yeah, they did.” He also defended his courtroom access restrictions, saying it was an “easy decision” and maintained that “the general public had access to the courtroom.”
“The case remains a ‘pending or impending proceeding’ before the Court at this time, and public statements expressing the judge’s personal views on these matters would suggest to a reasonable person the judge’s probable decision on any motion for a new trial that may be filed,” the motion says. “Most pointedly, the Court publicly defended the very courtroom-access restrictions that Mr. Anthony challenges as having denied him a public trial — the subject of his contemporaneously filed request for an evidentiary hearing and Motion for New Trial. The Court has now publicly characterized the same restrictions as proper and asserted that the public had access to the courtroom. The Court would thus be required to rule on a challenge to its own rulings after publicly committing, in the media, to those rulings’ correctness.”
No date has been set for any arguments on the motions.
