Karmelo Anthony Verdict

Anthony was convicted today of murdering Metcalf and is awaiting his sentence.  Tune in for my take, as someone involved with the US justice system for many, many years, on what this means.

-LEO

Transcript

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All right. Let's talk briefly about the Carmelo Anthony murder case. He was found guilty today. If you're not familiar with this, Carmelo Anthony, high school student, was accused of stabbing to death. I think his name's Austin Metcalf. I know his last name is Metcalf during a high school track meet. Anthony was under the opposing high school's tent, hanging out. I think it was raining, and he was asked to leave, and things escalated when he was asked to leave by the team that owned the tent, and it resulted in Metcalf being stabbed to death. So I want to get into a couple things about this. I'm not going to do an analysis. The jury has already found Carmelo Anthony guilty of murder. He was 17 at the time that he stabbed. He's now 19. And at some point you have to decide if you believe in the system or not. If you accept the verdicts or not, I don't always agree with them, but I have chosen to accept them as the system I live in. So that is what it is. So Carmelo Anthony is guilty of murder. He was a juvenile. He was tried as an adult. And he is awaiting sentencing. Couple things to cover. A lot of cities and departments, it's easy to judge your success based on the murder rate. Did the murder rate go up or down? Did the homicide rate go up or down? Homicide being man killing man, murder being a killing with malicious intent, essentially. The murder rate is not something that you can really control. The murder rate is something that happens. It's, I mean, try to prevent a murder. You don't know if Johnny decides he wants to kill Janie or vice versa. You don't know that's going to happen. So lowering the murder rate in a city is extremely hard. You can lower certain crime rates. You can lower part one crimes, which are how the FBI uniform crime report generally measures, you know, the crime quality in a city, the crime issues. But the murder rate, I don't know how to drop that because that's usually very personal. I think it can be usually lowered through proactive means. I believe in the ATF mission, the FBI violent crime mission, these groups target violent groups that habitually commit murder. They're not targeting a specific murder incident. They're targeting people that are likely to do murder. And that's an important mission. So just deciding where to live based on the murder rate, uh, or, you know, deciding if it's safe. Generally, people that are murdered are involved in something. I don't know. I'm not talking about this case, but most places, I would, if I got to throw a number on it, I would say like 70% of murder victims are somehow involved with the suspect and somehow involved in some kind of lifestyle that is high risk. It's pretty normal. So let's go into the lives lost during this, because you think of one life lost, right? Metcalf. He died. He's gone. You think of that being the life lost. Now let's look at his brother that was there and held him while he died. His parents, any other siblings. I don't know what else he has, all his friends who carry trauma, even people that don't know him at that school that carry trauma. And now let's go into the other side, Carmelo Anthony. His life is lost. I mean, I don't know how much time he's gonna get. It's pending, but probably not less than like 30 years. You know, at 19, that puts you at 49. I mean, give me a break. That's essentially life. You have to become institutionalized. You have to get used to eating honey buns and living in a small room with somebody else and lifting weights in the yard. You become a prisoner. So his life is gone. And then we have his family who loved him. There's no question about that. And wanted him to have a good life and become a good man and raise a family. I guarantee you they wanted that. And they've lost that. And every Mother's Day, I mean, I've been to, I couldn't tell you how many murder trials where it's not just the victim's mom crying, it's the suspect's mom. They didn't want that for their child. So his family, you can roll your eyes and go, ah, they deserve it. Their family, his family doesn't deserve it. He made a choice. He was found guilty, but his mother, his father, whoever he's got that's close to him, his priest, whatever, they lost somebody too. And the ripple effect of life lost is enormous when someone is killed. Uh, the the officers involved that picked up a dead child's body, the prosecutor that looked at the photos 150, 200, 300 times, decided what order to put them in, and created a PowerPoint to present to a jury. Everybody is troubled by this, by seeing a dead child. Regardless of, you know, there's a racial component here, regardless of that. Doesn't matter. It's a dead child. So it's sad, and people just don't realize the effect of what they're doing. So I ask that if anyone's thinking about making a dumb choice, just realize the ripple effect and don't do that. There have been some witnesses come forward that it looks like are just lying. They are saying that they saw Metcalf and his high school jumping the guy. This is after the verdict. Just a bunch of stupid stuff. So it's just something to think about. People, they have their own agenda. They have what they want to happen. If it doesn't happen, they're not going to accept the verdict. They're not like us, where they're like, uh, he was found guilty, therefore he's guilty. No matter what I feel, I wasn't in the trial. I wasn't chosen on the jury. It's not my decision, and this is the system I live in. They're not looking at it like that. They're like, no, he got found guilty. I'm going to make some stuff up. And a little bit of that's going on where they're saying some things that are untrue. So just keep that in mind. And lastly, I want to talk about unit statistics. The homicide unit, you have a clearance rate, right? If you have an 80% clearance rate in a big city, you're doing really good. You're solving eight out of 10 murders. Uh, most big cities, it's more like 50 to 60%. But that's kind of a weird way of looking at it. Like it's like a batting average. Like I'm solving this amount out of the total problem. And the people that don't get the credit that they deserve are the people that prevent the homicides, the street crime units, the people that are targeting shooters, not drug dealers, the guys on a drug unit that are like, yeah, I'm on a drug, drug unit, but I'm targeting shooters. The ATF agents, the FBI agents, the DEA agents, the HSI agents, the marshals that go out and arrest, you know, shooters every day that are on the run that will kill again to protect their freedom. These are problematic people that need to be off the street. And this is how you lower what I said in the beginning, the overall homicide rate. It's not lowered by solving homicides. You can't blame a homicide unit for a for a high murder rate, really, unless they just don't solve anything. You can blame the lack of effective proactive units that are out there getting the guns out of the hands of shooters, catching murderers before they get a chance. So I just wanted to give a shout out to the SWAT teams that go in the doors on these guys every single day and catch them. The proactive drug units that are like, man, I'm gonna pass that kilo for that Draco off this shooter. I want this guy. This guy is bad news. He's a murderer. I know he is, but I can get him for drugs. So sorry to the families of both Metcalf and Anthony. I feel for both of you, it's a tragedy all around. Any loss of life is tragic, and both sides lose. So stay off the trigger.