It’s news like the murder conviction of 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony that makes Little Elm mother Aisha Pleasant wonder why the verdict was so different in her son’s murder case.
Aisha’s son, 19-year-old David Pleasant, was shot and killed in a Little Elm neighborhood in 2023. His murder case went to trial in September.
A Denton County jury sentenced the shooter, then-17-year-old Alec Adamson of Prosper, to four years in prison for a lesser offense.
In neighboring Collin County, a jury recently sentenced Anthony to 35 years for murder as charged in the stabbing of 17-year-old Austin Metcalf in Frisco.
The case has garnered national attention over the races of the teens, with the defendant Black and victim white.
Conversely, Adamson is white and David was Black.
“Why was [David] dispensable, but this kid was more valuable?” Aisha Pleasant said.
She is not the only one making the comparison.
Since Anthony’s conviction on June 9, social media users have posted side-by-side comparisons of Anthony and Adamson.
Many social media posts have focused on the number of years that Karmelo Anthony and Alec Adamson were sentenced to prison..
More than 12,000 readers returned to the Denton Record-Chronicle’s coverage of the Adamson trial.
The cases do share some similarities.
Both involved high school teenagers all from neighboring communities: Frisco, Little Elm and Prosper.
The defendant in each case is a different race than the deceased.
Both defendants went to trial for murder. Both argued self-defense at trial.
Neither trial had any Black jurors.
There are differences, too.
Adamson’s case was a shooting that involved Adamson carrying a gun and selling drugs near a neighborhood park, witnesses testified.
Prosecutors stated and witnesses testified that David Pleasant was strong-arm robbing Adamson but that David was fleeing when Adamson shot him in the back of the head.
Meanwhile, witnesses testified that Anthony stabbed Metcalf in the abdomen during a high school track meet.
Aisha Pleasant said she knows her son was not perfect, but he was young.
“My other son, he got in trouble as well, but now ... he’s in the military,” Aisha said. “It’s not like kids don’t make mistakes. Especially having a single parent.”
Aisha said she feels David’s opportunity to change was taken away from him. So, a four-year sentence for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon instead of murder feels like an injustice, she said.
Some social media users point to the defendants’ races, and the lack of Black jurors, as the cause of this injustice.
Aisha said, “That could be so.”
“I never went into this looking at it as a race thing,” Aisha said. “I was looking at this as, ‘What the heck happened?’ I just wanted the truth, and I never got it.”
One-to-one case comparisons such as verdicts in Adamson’s case versus Anthony’s, Adam Trahan said, are troublesome when used to draw conclusions about jurors' races and verdicts.
A North Texas-based researcher, Trahan holds a Ph.D. in criminal justice from Indiana University Bloomington. He has advised Indiana litigators on voir dire and jury selection in capital cases.
He also has published research on jury behavior. This is primarily in capital cases, but Trahan said the same effects can apply to felony cases, too.
The races of jurors and the races of the parties involved in the case, Trahan said, do have a quantifiable impact on the outcomes of cases.
However, Trahan said, it’s more complex than it may seem on the surface.
“You have this sort of ecosystem of factors all pinging off each other that make it such that the all-white jury is a real phenomenon,” Trahan said. “We make a lot of the all-white jury, and that should be looked at, understood and critiqued. But it’s also important to think in terms of an overwhelming majority of white jurors.”
It takes more than one Black juror, Trahan said, before researchers start seeing differences in case outcomes. The threshold is more like three or four Black jurors, he said.
"The Impact of Jury Race in Criminal Trials," a 2011 research paper published by the Research Showcase at Carnegie Mellon University, analyzed 785 trials in Florida and states “the application of justice is highly uneven and raise[s] obvious concerns about the fairness of trials in jurisdictions with a small proportion” of Black people in the jury pool.
The jury selection process is structured in such a way, Trahan said, that it’s easier to get Black people off the jury — particularly in places like Denton and Collin counties, where Black people are a minority population, and therefore are likely to be a minority of the people summoned.
Jury selection, Trahan said, is a bit of a misnomer, and more accurately described as jury elimination. It has two prongs for elimination: challenges for cause and peremptory challenges.
Challenges for cause mean a person is stricken because they do not meet the legal requirements to serve as a juror, such as the juror has prior knowledge of the case, or admits an explicit bias.
Peremptory challenges allow prosecutors or defense attorneys to strike a juror for any reason. Each side gets a set number of peremptory challenges depending on the type of case as outlined in the Texas Penal Code.
Neither side can outright strike a juror because of race, Trahan said, but they also do not have to state the specific reason for striking.
“It’s easier, frankly, to use peremptory challenges to get prospective jurors off of the box, because you only have to use it a couple times,” Trahan said. “Whereas, if you’re going to try to get rid of white jurors, you’re going to burn up all 10 of those peremptory challenges.”
Attorney's for Anthony have appealed his conviction. Anthony's attorneys objected after three Black prospective jurors were struck by Collin County prosecutors, who told the judge that was because they were educators.
Trahan said there is a “mountain of data” that indicates Black and white people tend to have some differing attitudinal characteristics toward the criminal justice system and law enforcement.
Regardless of the race of the defendant or victim, Trahan said, white people tend to be more inclined toward the prosecution.
“White people are generally more punitive and supportive of harsh criminal punishment,” Trahan said. “They’re more prosecution-oriented. … They’re less susceptible to exculpatory evidence — evidence that suggests someone may be not guilty. They’re more trusting of inculpatory evidence that does suggest they’re guilty.”
Regardless of the race of the defendant or victim, Trahan said, Black people are statistically more defense-oriented.
“Black jurors tend to be more skeptical of cops’ testimony,” Trahan said. “The defense is always going to be critical of the police. It maybe creates little fissures of doubt: ‘What did you do with the evidence? Why isn’t the body camera on from start to finish?’ Just the things defense attorneys do. Black people tend to lend more credence to that.”
The race of the jurors is just one level of factors that shape outcomes, Trahan said, but it’s the most influential level.
“Underneath that level,” Trahan said, “the racial dynamics of the victim and the defendant do play a slight role. But only after the race of the jurors shapes their initial positions.”
White jurors are more likely to give harsher sentences to defendants regardless of the defendant's race, Trahan said, and within that, more likely to give a harsher sentence to a Black defendant than a white defendant.
Black jurors are more likely to give harsher sentences to white defendants than Black defendants, Trahan said.
While all that is supported by research, Trahan said, it takes hundreds or thousands of cases before one can draw conclusions about why jurors of different demographic makeups make different decisions.
“Probabilities are borne out across large samples,” Trahan said. “That’s why I say comparing one case to another to reach or draw conclusions is a bad idea. I wouldn’t want to say, ‘Oh, look these jurors behaved this way, and these other jurors behaved a different way.' ... Comparing a group of 12 to a group of 12. That’s bad science.”
The Record-Chronicle asked Trahan if he thought a different demographic makeup of jurors would have changed the outcome in either the Anthony or Adamson case.
“If you run the cases 100 times, yeah,” Trahan said. “When I was doing jury consulting, you tell these lawyers, ‘These characteristics are associated with this type of outcome.’ That’s true with 1,000, 1,200, 2,000 jurors. When we’re talking about an individual person, I can’t answer that.”
Essentially, Trahan said, there is no way to accurately predict what would have happened in the Anthony or Adamson cases with a different jury unless the trial could be simulated the same way many times.
But a single case, Trahan said, can be good for illustrating real-world examples of well-researched phenomena.
“Telling a story that’s borne out of data is one thing,” Trahan said. “Trying to reach conclusions, like, ‘Look at this case. That must mean —’ Let’s be a little cautious about that.”
Aisha Pleasant told the Record-Chronicle she is not sure how she feels about the recent online attention on her son's case and the comparisons.
“I get what they’re trying to go at with it,” Aisha said. “Yes, it was so unfair.”
She is still looking for a sense of justice, Aisha said, but trying to be strong for her other children and not lose herself in the process.
Since the trial, she has written to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles asking that it deny Adamson parole.
Aisha wrote, “Justice was not truly serviced in the courtroom, and parole would only deepen that injustice. Granting parole would send the message that taking a life and engaging in violent criminal behavior has little consequence.”
The parole board denied Adamson parole on Jan. 27, and determined he should not be released until he serves his maximum sentence.
The board denied parole on the grounds that the offense includes "excessive substance use involvement," and indicates “a conscious disregard for the lives, safety, or property of others, such that [Adamson] poses a continuing threat to public safety,” and that “the length of time served … is not congruent with the offense severity and criminal history.”
Adamson is set to be released on Aug. 1, 2027.
BROOKE COLOMBO can be reached at 940-566-6882 and bcolombo@dentonrc.com.
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