00:00You cannot stab someone in the chest and kill them because they touch you.
00:04I think a lot of what this case is going to come down to is going to remind us of
00:10what happened in the O.J. Simpson case.
00:11The race card is going to be played here.
00:14A Texas student athlete charged with stabbing a football star from a rival high school to death is set to
00:20face trial this week.
00:22Carmelo Anthony, then a 17-year-old senior from Frisco Centennial High School, stabbed Frisco Memorial High Schooler Austin Metcalfe
00:30on April 2, 2025.
00:33After Metcalfe asked Anthony to leave his team's tent during a track meet, prosecutors have claimed.
00:39Witnesses say Anthony told Metcalfe, quote, touch me and see what happens, while reaching inside his bag before a brief
00:45scuffle, in which Anthony stabbed Metcalfe in the chest with a knife.
00:50Anthony then allegedly fled as Metcalfe bled out in his twin brother's arms.
00:55The case kicked off a major racial uproar online, with donations pouring in to defend Anthony.
01:01A family spokesman said last year that the money would go to, quote, stand with us in the fight against
01:06white supremacy.
01:08As Anthony's lawyers say he acted in self-defense, the New York Post spoke with a criminal defense attorney to
01:13break down the case.
01:14Hi, my name is Randy Zellin.
01:18I am a criminal defense attorney.
01:20I have been practicing for 38 years.
01:24I am a former prosecutor and I have been an adjunct professor at Cornell University School of Law.
01:30First of all, when we're talking about justification, self-defense, what I am saying as a defendant is that I
01:41had a reasonable belief that someone was going to immediately hurt me.
01:50That is justification against ordinary force.
01:54Now, up that ante.
01:56If I use deadly force on someone, if I kill someone and my defense is self-defense or justification, the
02:07jury has to be.
02:10Not convinced, if you will, by the government that I acted reasonably, that I reasonably believe that I was about
02:19to be killed.
02:20And as a result of that reasonable belief that I was about to be killed, I killed first.
02:26I killed in self-defense.
02:29So the first issue I see here, from what we know, this was a verbal altercation where it almost seems
02:39like the defendant was provoking the incident himself by allegedly saying,
02:46touch me and see what happens as he's reaching into a bag.
02:49And then apparently he was touched.
02:53Touching someone is not deadly force.
02:56You cannot meet deadly force.
02:59You cannot stab someone in the chest and kill them because they touch you.
03:03They've got to be coming at you with a knife.
03:05They've got to be coming at you with a gun.
03:07They've got to be coming at you with a metal pipe to split your head open.
03:12You can't be justified in killing someone with a knife and stabbing them in the chest.
03:18If they were not about to use, immediately use, deadly force on you.
03:25Then now take the opposite act.
03:27We see at the beginning whether or not the defendant was justified.
03:32And at the end, we see something called consciousness of guilt.
03:36The fact that he fled the scene to me cuts against a self-defense, a justification defense, because if I
03:48acted innocently and I just stabbed someone because I thought they were going to kill me, I don't think I
03:55would run.
03:55So I don't think that the defendant's sense was reasonable, that he was about to be killed, nor do I
04:03think his behavior afterwards is consistent, is equally unreasonable from the standpoint of behaving like someone who is innocent.
04:13What the defendant was doing with a knife on him, I think, is going to be telling.
04:20So you have the absence of the ability to use deadly force versus someone having deadly force immediately on hand
04:28at a high school track meet.
04:32So unless he was a chef, unless he was a fisherman, what is he doing with a knife that is
04:42capable of killing someone with apparently one strike?
04:48So that's going to be another hurdle that I see the defense having to overcome.
04:55But if we're going to play this case down the middle, I think a lot of what this case is
05:02going to come down to is going to remind us of what happened in the O.J. Simpson case.
05:08The race card is going to be played here.
05:10And I do believe that the defense is going to be looking for a jury that's going to say, I
05:18don't know what happened here and I don't even care what happened here.
05:21But I am so tired of white people doing things to black people and it's the black people that end
05:32up on trial and it's not right and it's not fair.
05:37It's something called jury nullification.
05:39And I do believe that race has already been and will continue to be a very big issue in this
05:48case.
05:49It's not fair to the prosecution.
05:51I don't think it's fair, quite frankly, to any race where a defendant is playing that card.
05:59But as a defense attorney, that ain't my job.
06:01My job is to get my client off by any means reasonably and legally necessary.
06:07So if I can play the race card and I can be the second coming of Johnny Cochran and my
06:12client walks out of the courthouse with me, either acquitted or with a hung jury, I'll sleep that night.
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