How no-nonsense judge in Karmelo Anthony’s racially charged murder case made sure trial was ironclad

MCKINNEY, Texas — A no-nonsense Texas judge ran Karmelo Anthony’s murder trial like a “well-oiled machine” to ensure it was efficient, fair and wouldn’t get overturned, experts said — all while racial tensions have roiled outside the halls of justice.

Veteran Judge John Roach Jr. oversaw the Collin County trial that ended with the 19-year-old black teen convicted of murdering white high school jock Austin Metcalf Tuesday and sentenced by a jury to 35 years behind bars — after which Anthony’s grandmother and a crowd of mostly black supporters blasted the outcome as “racist.”

Roach — who has been on the bench since 2007 and is slated to retire at the end of the year — pushed the closely watched five-day trial along at breakneck speed, even having the jury sit for testimony on a Saturday and having them deliberate on both Anthony’s guilt and sentencing in one day, keeping them until around 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.

Collin County criminal defense lawyer Jeremy Rosenthal, who isn’t connected to the Anthony case and has had many cases before Roach, said the fast pace is normal for the judge.

“He works very hard, very efficiently and very quickly,” said Rosenthal, who attended the trial Friday. “The speed at which this went is not a surprise to anybody who knows him. This trial was a very well-oiled machine.”

“He pushes people but that’s just what he does,” Rosenthal said.

Roach also kept a tight lid on the trial — issuing a gag order barring prosecutors and the defense from making statements to the press. And he threw a number of people out of the courtroom gallery for talking during testimony and chastised a prosecutor for being two minutes late.

Jurors were also sequestered in hotel rooms — without their phones — once they began deliberations.

When it came down to controlling the media frenzy, Roach only allowed nine news outlets in the tiny courtroom to cover the trial, banning cameras altogether and only allowing 20 additional seats for the general public. Outside the McKinney courthouse, a perimeter was set up so the public couldn’t gather any closer than the parking lot across the street, guarded closely by officers.

Electronics were not allowed in court, either.

Rosenthal said these detailed measures were all to ensure Anthony and victims got the fairest possible trial that would hold up on appeal.

“I think he didn’t want to have this trial twice,” the Collin County lawyer said. “He wanted to make sure that Karmelo Anthony got a fair trial, that the state of Texas got a fair trial and that everybody was safe in doing so.”

“And he didn’t want something to jeopardize that and have a mistrial like we did with Alex Murdaugh’s case,” Rosenthal said, referring to the ex-Virginia lawyer’s murder conviction getting overturned because of a court clerk interfering with the jury.

The judge would also have been keenly aware of the racial tensions surrounding Anthony’s case from the outset and would’ve attempted to ensure that all biased and prejudicial opinions never touched the trial, Rosenthal said.

“As a judge, you always want an antiseptic environment. He was doing his best to provide that for the parties,” Rosenthal said. “His responsibility is to give the litigants a fair trial and making sure he provided enough lawful access to the outside world to the proceedings.”

Another Texas-based lawyer, Sam Bassett, agreed with Rosenthal that “a judge’s main concern is not to let extraneous influences impact a jury’s decision. Some judges are better at it than others.”

“He was experienced enough to know you had to keep things under the radar,” and not let anything from outside influence the jurors, Bassett said.

Roach had to walk a fine line between balancing Anthony’s right to a fair trial with the public’s right to access the high-profile case.

“There are these First Amendment concerns,” Bassett said. “The judge has to pay deference to the right of the public to attend trial but also with due process concerns and the fairness of the trial. He balanced that in favor of efficiency and restriction.”

Roach is also known for going to great lengths to understand the cases he was overseeing: he ate lunch at the jail to make sure it was decent, wore an ankle monitor to see if it hurt and drove a car with an ignition interlock attached.

He frequently brings his service dog, a brown Boykin Spaniel named Justice, to court to monitor his blood pressure, according to the Dallas Morning News.

The jurist also handled the high-profile case against Brandon McCall, who was sentenced to death in 2020 after a jury convicted him of killing police officer David Sherrard, the outlet reported.

Roach told the jurors in that case their decision for McCall to receive capital punishment “sent a message that if you kill a cop in Texas, we’ll give you a fair trial, but you’re gonna die,” the outlet reported.

Anthony was convicted of fatally stabbing Metcalf, 17, after getting into a dispute at Kuykendall Stadium in Frisco during a track and field meet on April 2, 2025.

The jury — made up of white, Asian and Hispanic members, but no black people — heard testimony that Metcalf, a student at Frisco Memorial High School, asked Anthony, who attended Frisco Centennial High School, to get out of his team’s tent.

Anthony refused to move despite being asked some 15 times by Metcalf and other Memorial teammates, according to testimony. Metcalf shoved Anthony, who took a semi-serrated folding knife out of his backpack and plunged it once into Metcalf’s chest, witnesses testified.

Anthony’s team maintained he felt threatened by Metcalf and carried out the knifing in self-defense, but the defense chose not to call him at trial.