Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, used her podcast this week to cast doubt on the murder conviction of Karmelo Anthony, and in the process suggested she might have done the same thing Anthony did: plunge a knife into the chest of a 17-year-old track star at a high school meet in Frisco, Texas.
Anthony, now 19, was convicted of first-degree murder after a Collin County jury deliberated for roughly three hours. He was sentenced to 35 years in prison. The victim, Austin Metcalf, bled to death after a semi-serrated, 5-inch pocket knife penetrated his sternum and entered his heart.
None of that stopped the lame-duck congresswoman from minimizing the weapon, mischaracterizing the confrontation, and floating a self-defense theory that the jury already rejected. The comments, made on Tuesday's episode of "Clock It with Crockett," drew swift backlash online and raised fresh questions about how far some elected officials will go to excuse violent crime.
On her podcast, Crockett appeared surprised by the size of the weapon, as the New York Post reported. She held her thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, as if to demonstrate how small she believed the blade was.
"Wait a minute, it was this?... Was it a switch? I don't know what he had."
A guest on the podcast described the weapon as "a multi-tool." Crockett ran with it.
"Yeah, like with the little scissors and everything and whatever. So it was small. Well, I would argue the size of it alone, you wouldn't even think it's a deadly weapon."
The knife was, in fact, a 5-inch semi-serrated blade, reported elsewhere as a $13 Walmart blade with a flashlight. It left a gaping 2-inch stab wound. Metcalf, a 6-foot, 200-pound high school athlete, died from it. The Collin County district attorney, Bill Wirskye, called the stabbing a "sneak attack."
Crockett then shifted to a hypothetical self-defense argument that the trial record does not support:
"If a 300-pound man is beating me, like on top of me and beating me down, I'm not limited to fists."
That framing bears little resemblance to what witnesses described in court. Eddie Parra, an 18-year-old witness, testified that Metcalf was trying to remove an interloper from the track team's tent when Anthony immediately became aggressive. Parra said Anthony dared Metcalf to "touch me" and warned, "you're going to have to move me." Witnesses said Metcalf shoved Anthony, and Anthony then pulled out the knife and stabbed him in the chest.
No testimony cited in reporting describes a 300-pound man beating anyone down. Metcalf weighed 200 pounds. Anthony, a high school football standout, was listed at 5 feet 11 and 162 pounds. The size gap was real but modest, and it was Anthony who escalated to a blade.
This was not Crockett's first venture into criminal-justice commentary that strains credulity. She previously told Jonathan Van Ness on his "Getting Better" podcast:
"Just because someone has committed a crime, it doesn't make them a criminal."
That line reads like a bumper sticker for a philosophy that refuses to hold anyone accountable for anything. Applied to a case where a jury found first-degree murder beyond a reasonable doubt, after just three hours of deliberation, it lands somewhere between tone-deaf and reckless.
The case roiled Texas for more than a year. It involved two teenagers, a public track meet at Memorial High School, and a death that left a family without a son. The facts were contested at trial, and a jury weighed them. That is how the system works. What Crockett did on her podcast was something different: she second-guessed the verdict, distorted the weapon, invented a scenario that didn't match the testimony, and implied she would have done the same thing the convicted killer did.
Clips of Crockett's podcast circulated on X, and the responses were not kind. One user wrote: "Why does it matter what he used to kill him? A rope isn't a deadly weapon until it's used to strangle someone." Another put it more simply: "Pretty sure Metcalf is dead, so it sounds like a deadly weapon to me."
A third user accused Crockett of twisting the facts entirely, writing that she "should have at least googled what happened before she opened her... mouth."
Crockett did not respond to a request for comment from the New York Post.
The trial produced a clear picture. A dispute over access to a team tent at a track meet escalated when Anthony refused to leave and dared Metcalf to make him. Witnesses said Metcalf shoved Anthony. Anthony responded not with a shove, not with a punch, but with a 5-inch blade to the chest. The knife went through the sternum and into the heart. Metcalf, 17, bled to death.
A Collin County jury heard the evidence, deliberated about three hours, and returned a first-degree murder verdict. The judge sentenced Anthony to 35 years. Anthony has since appealed.
Crockett's podcast reimagined the encounter as a large man beating down a helpless victim who had no choice but to use a tiny tool in self-defense. The witness testimony contradicts that version. The jury rejected it. The district attorney called it a sneak attack.
Yet a sitting member of Congress went on the air and told her audience she would have done the same thing.
Crockett represents a district in Texas, a state where the case drew intense public attention. She is a failed Senate candidate and an outgoing House member, described as a lame duck, which may explain why she felt free to say what she said without political consequence. But the consequences fall elsewhere.
They fall on the Metcalf family, who watched a congresswoman suggest their son's killer was justified. They fall on the public's confidence in elected officials who are supposed to respect the legal process, not undermine jury verdicts from a podcast studio. And they fall on a broader culture that increasingly treats violent offenders as victims and actual victims as afterthoughts.
Crockett did not dispute that Anthony stabbed Metcalf. She did not claim new evidence had emerged. She did not argue prosecutorial misconduct. She simply suggested the weapon was too small to be deadly, despite the fact that it killed a teenager, and that she, too, would have used it.
That is not criminal-justice reform. That is not advocacy. That is a sitting lawmaker telling the public that stabbing a 17-year-old in the heart is an understandable response to a shove at a track meet.
Austin Metcalf is dead. A jury spoke. Jasmine Crockett decided she knew better, and said so on a podcast named after herself. That tells you everything about whose interests she was really serving.