A Milwaukee woman has been jailed for 11 years for killing the man that prosecutors said had sex trafficked her as a teenager.
The sentence, issued on Monday, ends a six-year legal battle for Chrystul Kizer, now 24, who had argued she should be immune from prosecution.
Kizer was charged with reckless homicide for shooting Randall Volar, 34, in 2018 when she was 17. She accepted a plea deal earlier this year to avoid a life sentence.
Volar had been filming his sexual abuse of Kizer for more than a year before he was killed.
Kizer said she met Volar when she was 16, and that the man sexually assaulted her while giving her cash and gifts. She said he also made money by selling her to other men for sex.
I am outraged, a plea deal to avoid life imprisonment? What the fuck did I just read?!
This guy trafficked, raped and tortured her, and other underage women. Police did jack shit. And she was supposed to be watching him just walk away? Grotesque.
That poor girl, this world is so disgustingly unfair.
Now with that said, it is not your place to obtain whatever you may think is “justice”. We have no need or want for vigilantism, all that creates is more opportunities for mistakes to happen and innocents hurt.
Now with that said, it is not your place to obtain whatever you may think is “justice”. We have no need or want for vigilantism, all that creates is more opportunities for mistakes to happen and innocents hurt.
Yes it is your place. If the law doesn’t account for that and unjustly puts you behind bars, the problem is with the law.
This case is an easy one. The problem is folks seeking justice for slights that aren’t so heinous and the whole drawing the line thing.
I’m totally on board with her killing the dude, if I was on the jury I’d have ignored the charge from the judge 100%. There should be a “what you did is illegal and you are guilty, but no jail for you” kinda deal.
That’s jury nullification. And every district does it’s best to make sure juries never hear about it. Some have even outlawed it. But it’s a natural consequence of the jury system. If you can’t nullify the charges as a jury then you aren’t a jury, you’re a rubber stamp.
It’s a jury’s job to find a defendant guilty or not guilty of a given charge.
When a jury starts considering whether they feel a charge is fair, they’re pretty much just making up the law. At that point you don’t need a court and a jury you could just have a bunch of people deciding the defendants fate based on the vibe.
When you say they “don’t want jurors to know”, they simply want jurors who understand their role in finding a defendant guilty or not guilty. Thinking that nullification is a possible outcome is tantamount to a refusal to fulfil the role of a juror.
That is them finding not guilty. It’s called nullification because the jury instructions are usually something stupid like, “if you believe he did the act you must vote guilty.”
Which just isn’t true. The entire purpose of juries is to avoid miscarriage of justice by law. Otherwise you can just outlaw a skin color and juries are forced to rubber stamp that.
It just doesn’t hold up in practice or theory.
The entire purpose of juries is to avoid miscarriage of justice by law.
This is patently false. Juries have a very clear role, to consider the charges against a defendant and weigh the evidence supporting those charges and conclude whether the charges are likely to be true beyond any reasonable doubt.
There is no step whereby jurors must consider the likely penalties arising from the charges and whether or not those penalties seem fair given the context - that is very clearly the role of a judge.
Otherwise you can just outlaw a skin color and juries are forced to rubber stamp that.
Correct. There’s a democratic process for creating laws. If a government creates a law making having a given skin color a criminal act, then the role of a jury in such a case would be to find the defendant guilty. In this absurd hypothetical example, there are a myriad of better options to avoid this eventuality, such as not electing a government that would create such a law.
So you’re down for authoritarian democracy. Good to know. Of course you’d want a rubber stamp jury. But our founders instituted juries the way they did specifically because parliament passed and enforced unjust laws. To say they must convict on the most absurd of laws flies in the face of our entire history.
That’s not vigilantism. That’s escape. We’re locking this woman up for escaping her situation.
She’d already escaped. She was free of him. Then she got a gun, hunted him down, and shot him.
This is why she couldn’t claim self defense or a battered woman defense - she’d already escaped.
So glad you’re just taking the prosecution’s word as fact. Her defense was that she was literally in the process of being raped.
Did you read the article? It sounds like she had escaped. Maybe her persecutor had psychological control over her but not physical, that makes it vigilantism.
The facts of the case are barely present in the public sphere because she was denied her self defense argument in court. It’s entirely possible Volar had tracked down escaped women before and entirely possible she was in the process of escaping others working with him. Literally the only thing the prosecution said is that she traveled between cities.
And if this was vigilantism, why hasn’t she gotten the same treatment as Kyle Rittenhouse? It’s the same state but when she travels with a gun, gets in a fight and ends it she’s not allowed the self defence argument he had?
gets in a fight
No fight here.
Not according to her attorneys.
Obviously Chrystul is aware of all the facts and she decided that her actions didn’t meet the legal definition of self defence.
They literally denied her the defense.
So Chrystul is aware of all the facts and understands that her actions didn’t meet the legal definition of self defence ?
According to the system. That did give that defence to the guy who traveled to a protest to shoot people.
I need that F to doubt button.
This lady needs to be pardoned or it’s the origin story for a villain who has an understandable grudge against the justice system.
Sorry, America governors only pardon you when its the pedophile doing the murdering.
To preface, I am not defending the police or the piece of shit abuser. This was handled extraordinarily horrendously. Police even knew about the guy’s crimes and let him off without a slap on the wrist.
The basis of my thoughts comes from this paragraph in the article:
Police said that Kizer travelled from Milwaukee to Volar’s home in Kenosha in June 2018 armed with a gun. She shot him twice in the head, set his house on fire and took his car.
I don’t know any info beyond what the article gives, but it sounds like at that point she wasn’t being held captive and murdered to get away from her abuser. She actively plotted and had the freedom to travel and kill him. Unless there’s something I’m missing, I don’t think I could consider this as actively being self defense.
No but it was deserved justice for a crime that was going unpunished
Do we really want vigilantism though? Because that’s where this leads.
Maybe the police should do their job for a change.
Which is true, and also doesn’t address the point. (Also, obligatory ACAB.)
The problem with vigilantism is that the vigilante both decides whether an offense has been committed, and what the punishment should be for that offense. If I’ve been hit repeatedly by people speeding in my neighborhood, and cops aren’t giving the speeders tickets, no one in their right mind is going to say that I should start shooting at people driving in my neighborhood. (Or, I would hope no one in their right mind would say that.)
Downvoted just f the ACAB. Who said it’s obligatory? Why? That one phrase that reeks of generalization, civilized society has adopted it now? If this is not what it’s supposed to mean, I am open to explanations.
The point is that the system of policing that we have now is corrupt, and doesn’t protect or help victims. We see this quite often with sexual assault, where cops flatly refuse to investigate; rape kits remain untested for decades. The “good” police officers that try to affect change from within the system end up empowering the system, or get thrown out.
So if the current system is corrupt, what are the chances for a vigilante system? Somehow less corrupt? And based on what, the goodness of those who are willing to be vigilantes? Sounds like Police v2 minus any shred of accountability or system to handle abuse cases.
The dowvotes on this one worry me.
Yeah the police don’t work so your solution is to go be even worse police? At this point, no justice at all might be better rofl.
This is a failure on her attorney to make a good case. There is no way a normal person votes to convict here. There has to be something we’re missing as to why they agreed to a guilty charge.
She actively plotted and traveled to get revenge and clearly didn’t act in self defense. While it’s easy to be sympathetic to her story, her guilt seems difficult to deny.
This:
Police said that Kizer travelled from Milwaukee to Volar’s home in Kenosha in June 2018 armed with a gun. She shot him twice in the head, set his house on fire and took his car.
Whatever we think about this guy, it still was a murder.
Ehhh it was a nice murder.
She accepted a plea deal. No trial no jury.
Trials are expensive and she clearly didn’t have money to spend in her own defense.
“Four months before Volar died, police arrested him on charges of sexual assault but released him the same day.”
Yeah maybe we are not told about how corrupt police is.
Let killer cops go free, jail the victims of the failed justice system.
The cruelty seems to be the point.
Alright kids.
There’s this wonderful thing called “Jury Nullification”
That means if 1 juror refuses to convict then there is no conviction.
It is your privilege, right, and I daresay even duty to use this helpful tool when you deem it necessary. If you’re called for Jury Duty on a case. Let’s say non violent drug case. I don’t believe nonviolent drug offenses should be against the law at all except in the case of something really bad like Fentanyl. So if I was called I would refuse to convict if the defendant was there for let’s say Mary Jane.
But don’t ever say those words. Don’t allude to it. Don’t discuss it with your fellow jurors. Don’t Google it after you’ve been called. It’s your secret. But it’s a secret everyone should know if you get my meaning.
Now go forth and make the world a better place.
