Karmelo Anthony Case: Your Race Doesn’t Give You License to Kill

There has been a lot of insane commentary about the Karmelo Anthony case, largely emanating from people who simply cannot emotionally process or publicly admit that there might ever be a situation in which a black teenager is legitimately at fault for murdering a white person, and is justly punished for doing so. As our editorial on the case recited the evidence:

One immediate lesson for the people insisting that Anthony’s conviction for murder is a grave injustice should be: Don’t overinvest your ideology in the need to make the facts of every case fit it neatly. Human nature is messier and uglier than that. Sometimes, the group you’ve identified as the good guys are in the wrong. Sometimes, even the real bad guys have a point. As I wrote of the George Floyd case:

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Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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There has been a lot of insane commentary about the Karmelo Anthony case, largely emanating from people who simply cannot emotionally process or publicly admit that there might ever be a situation in which a black teenager is legitimately at fault for murdering a white person, and is justly punished for doing so. As our editorial on the case recited the evidence:

One immediate lesson for the people insisting that Anthony’s conviction for murder is a grave injustice should be: Don’t overinvest your ideology in the need to make the facts of every case fit it neatly. Human nature is messier and uglier than that. Sometimes, the group you’ve identified as the good guys are in the wrong. Sometimes, even the real bad guys have a point. As I wrote of the George Floyd case: