Karmelo Anthony's defense team rested its case in a high-stakes new-trial hearing in McKinney, Texas, after days of testimony exposed a bitter dispute over an oral agreement that kept the 19-year-old off the witness stand at his own murder trial.
Former defense attorneys and the lead prosecutor gave conflicting accounts of what the unwritten deal actually covered, and whether it silenced the one person whose testimony might have mattered most in a self-defense case. Retired District Judge Michael Chitty, assigned after the original trial judge was removed for appearing partial, now faces a Monday deadline to decide whether Anthony's conviction and 35-year sentence survive.
The hearing, Fox News Digital reported, wrapped shortly before noon Friday. At its core was a question that should trouble anyone who believes a defendant deserves a fair shot: did a handshake agreement between lawyers end up stripping Anthony of his right to tell a jury his side of the story?
A Collin County jury convicted Anthony in June of murdering Austin Metcalf, a 17-year-old who was fatally stabbed during an altercation at a Frisco, Texas track meet. The jury sentenced Anthony to 35 years in prison. He was transported to the Pack Unit near Navasota, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice facility, after conviction.
Before the trial began, Anthony's original defense team and the prosecution reached an oral agreement to keep character evidence about both sides away from the jury. No written motion was filed. No formal record was made. Former lead defense attorney Mike Howard testified Thursday that the lawyers and Judge John Roach held more than a dozen off-the-record meetings before trial, using what Howard called an "old-school" system of filing materials directly with Roach rather than through standard pretrial motions.
That informal arrangement became the fault line of the entire case.
Howard told the court he understood the agreement to allow Anthony to testify as long as his testimony stayed focused on the confrontation under the tent at the track meet. But on the final day of trial, prosecutors told the defense the deal would not apply if Anthony took the stand, and that the defense had already opened the door to character evidence.
Howard acknowledged under cross-examination that the lawyers never expressly agreed on whether a testifying defendant was covered by the arrangement. He said he could not say whether prosecutors acted in bad faith. That concession matters. It means even the defense's own former lead attorney could not call the prosecution's last-day reversal dishonest, only unexpected.
Anthony's defense team has been pushing for a new trial and the removal of the original judge since shortly after the conviction.
Lead prosecutor Bill Wirske offered a different reading of the deal. He testified that the agreement was mutual and that both sides wanted character evidence kept out. But the state, Wirske said, did not believe the agreement applied to Anthony's testimony. He said the lawyers never discussed the specific limits of what the deal would allow if Anthony took the stand.
Wirske acknowledged that both sides knew Anthony might testify, a natural expectation in any self-defense case. Yet prosecutors believed they would first need to work through the limits of his testimony before he could take the stand. Wirske said prosecutors were still willing to honor the agreement but feared that testimony from Anthony or his mother could inadvertently open the door to the very character evidence the deal was meant to exclude.
That character evidence, Wirske said, included allegations involving Anthony's history with knives and violence. The scope of that withheld evidence has drawn attention as details emerged during post-conviction proceedings.
Then came a moment that cut against Wirske's own position. A person identified only as Wilson introduced a training presentation Wirske had used in continuing legal education courses on self-defense. One slide advised defense lawyers that the client "(probably) needs to testify." Wirske, in other words, had taught other attorneys the very principle his own trial strategy appeared to undermine.
Former defense attorney Toby Shook took the stand Friday and backed up Howard's account. Shook said the original defense team understood the agreement to allow Anthony to testify about the confrontation at the Frisco track meet. He said he was taken aback when prosecutors argued on the trial's final day that the deal did not cover a testifying defendant.
Shook agreed that a defendant's testimony is often important in a self-defense case. He said Anthony ultimately decided not to testify because he feared prosecutors would "find a reason to open the door" to character evidence against him. For a 19-year-old facing a murder charge, that fear, whether justified or not, effectively silenced his only chance to explain what happened under the tent.
Shook did acknowledge that the lawyers could have had different understandings of the deal. That admission tracks with Howard's earlier concession and leaves the dispute in a gray zone: not clearly bad faith by prosecutors, but not clearly a fair outcome for the defendant either.
Anthony's conviction and 35-year sentence drew intense public attention from the start, including confrontations outside the Collin County Courthouse after sentencing.
Judge John Roach, who presided over Anthony's original trial, was removed from remaining trial-court proceedings earlier in the week by Judge Sid Harle. Harle found that a reasonable outside observer could question whether Roach appeared impartial after Roach publicly said the jury "got it right" and defended several of his trial decisions.
During the trial itself, Roach told the defense he could not enforce the unwritten agreement and would rule on any objections based on the evidence presented. That position left the defense in a bind: the deal they thought protected their client's ability to testify had no judicial backing, and the judge who refused to enforce it later went public praising the verdict.
Retired District Judge Chitty, now overseeing the new-trial hearing, questioned both sides about whether the agreement remained in place when Anthony was considering whether to testify. Under Texas rules, Chitty must rule on the motion by Monday. If he does not grant it, the motion is denied by operation of law and Anthony's direct appeal continues.
The unwritten deal is not the only issue before Chitty. Anthony's new legal team argues that courtroom-access restrictions violated his Sixth Amendment right to a public trial, the constitutional guarantee that criminal proceedings remain open to the public. Howard testified that no Sixth Amendment waiver was made on the record and that the decision not to use an overflow room was tied to technology concerns, not a specific security threat.
Anthony's motion also contends that jury instructions limited jurors' ability to consider his self-defense claim. His new attorneys argue that excluded evidence, school records, social-media posts, and videos, could have shown prior aggressive behavior by Metcalf and his twin brother, Hunter Metcalf, in support of that claim. Self-defense arguments in cases involving fatal force remain a flashpoint in courtrooms across the country.
The court has not made findings on any of those allegations. Anthony's crowdfunding page was pulled after his conviction, and his current legal team's identities have not been publicly disclosed in the proceedings covered so far.
Howard's testimony painted a picture of a case run on handshakes and hallway conversations, more than a dozen off-the-record meetings, no formal pretrial motions, and an agreement with no paper trail that collapsed at the worst possible moment. Whether that amounts to a constitutional violation or just sloppy lawyering is now Chitty's call.
When a man's liberty hangs on a deal nobody wrote down, the system has already failed someone. The only question left is who.
