Online race-baiters are attacking the judge who reduced the bond of Karmelo Anthony, the teenager charged with fatally stabbing 17-year-old Austin Metcalf at a track meet in Texas earlier this month.
Anthony, 17, was released from jail and placed under house arrest Monday after Judge Angela Tucker, who is Black, lowered the suspect’s bond from $1 million to $250,000.
That move was yet another flashpoint in a case that has inflamed racial tensions on social media.
“Meet Karmelo Anthony’s Judge Angela Tucker,” one self-proclaimed “Racist” wrote on X, alongside a photo of Tucker. “The black blm judge who reduced bail and gifted him house arrest.”
“This is the judge who slashed Karmelo Anthony’s bond from $1M to $250K,” a popular right-wing account followed by Elon Musk posted. “Need I say more?”
The Collin County judge made her X account private in response to the attention, the Daily Mail reported Tuesday morning, but that hasn’t stopped the online right from digging up Tucker’s past statements to demonstrate her supposed bias.
MAGA influencer Paul Szypula posted a video clip of an interview with Tucker in 2021 when she discussed the importance of diverse representation in the judicial system.
“Tucker is clearly letting her politics get in the way of justice,” Szypula wrote. “She needs to be impeached and sanctioned.”
But Tucker’s politics don’t square with the right’s caricature of an activist liberal jurist.
Tucker is a Republican who has been elected to the bench in the 199th District Court every four years since 2012.
In 2013, a Dallas-area family law firm praised Tucker as a “fair-minded judge who gives all the litigants who come before her the opportunity to be heard,” adding that it felt “lucky to have a conservative woman on the bench.” Last year, the Collin County GOP endorsed her in the same virtual breath as President Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
Apparently Tucker’s politics aren’t as important as her skin color to anonymous posters on X.
“At this rate the jury is going to be an all black jury,” one user wrote.
“Every race can have activist judges except whites,” another said.
Others simply replied with the letter “N.”
Plenty of users defended Tucker, however, pointing out the hypocrisy of vilifying Anthony yet celebrating white boys and men like Kyle Rittenhouse and Daniel Penny, who were charged and eventually acquitted of homicide in the deaths of Black people.
“This is Kyle Rittenhouse’s judge,” one X user wrote, alongside a photo of the white jurist who presided over Rittenhouse’s trial. “Need I say more?”
Rittenhouse was trending on X on Tuesday afternoon in response to Tucker’s bond decision.
Jeff Metcalf, Austin’s father, urged against making the case about race in an emotional Fox News interview just days after the killing.
“This was not a race thing. This is not a political thing,” Metcalf said. “Do not turn this into a racial thing. It’s not.”
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