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The Justice System’s Stunning Betrayal of Chrystul Kizer

NNPA NEWSWIRE — According to the Wisconsin State Public Defender’s office, the court denied Kizer eligibility to engage in any early release programs at the Department of Corrections; she should be freed in 2033.

Published

2 years ago

August 28, 2024

Oakland Post

By Stacy M. Brown
NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
@StacyBrownMedia

The opening words on a fundraiser page started four years ago remain harrowing: “Hello, I am the mother of, Chrystul Kizer, who was a minor at the time of her incarceration and is currently facing charges in Kenosha, WI, because she defended herself from a known sex trafficker,” Devore Taylor wrote. The page, which has raised more than $67,000 to date, a Facebook page urging authorities to “Free Chrystul,” and a Wisconsin law that seemed to side with Kizer wasn’t enough to stop a judge from sentencing the now 24-year-old to more than a decade in prison for killing the man who allegedly sex trafficked her.

A Kenosha County judge added 5 years of extended supervision to Kizer’s sentence in the 2018 death of Randall Volar, 34. She was given credit for 570 days, about one and a half years of time served. According to the Wisconsin State Public Defender’s office, the court denied Kizer eligibility to engage in any early release programs at the Department of Corrections; she should be freed in 2033. Kizer, who is Black, pled guilty in May to second-degree reckless murder in Volar’s killing, avoiding a trial and a possible life sentence.

Prosecutors said Kizer shot Volar at his Kenosha home in 2018 when she was 17, and that she then burned his house down and stole his BMW. Kizer was charged with multiple counts, including first-degree intentional homicide, arson, car theft, and being a felon in possession of a firearm. Incidentally, Kenosha is the same city where Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted after killing two men at a Black Lives Matter Rally. Kizer told police she encountered Volar on a sex trafficking website. She said that for the year before his death, he had been mistreating her and marketing her as a prostitute. She said she shot him as he tried to touch her.

Her attorneys argued that Kizer could not be held criminally accountable for any of it because of a 2008 state statute that exempts sex trafficking victims from “any offense committed as a direct result” of being trafficked. Over the last decade, most states have approved similar legislation that provides sex trafficking victims with some amount of criminal protection. Arguing in court pleadings that victims of trafficking feel imprisoned and occasionally feel as though they had to take matters into their own hands, anti-violence organizations swarmed Kizer’s defense. In 2022 the state Supreme Court decided Kizer could raise the defense during trial. However, prosecutors argued that Wisconsin lawmakers couldn’t have meant for safeguards to include homicide.

“I think about all the people who harmed Chrystul who are walking free today. There are individual men in southeastern Wisconsin who paid to sexually abuse Chrystul. They’re walking free. Only Chrystul is being held responsible,” Claudine O’Leary, an independent consultant for survivors of human trafficking with Rethink Resources who worked with Kizer’s defense team, said on the NPR show, “Wisconsin Today.”

Many observed that the case mirrors that of Cyntoia Brown, which played out over 15-years in Tennessee. In 2006, Brown, also Black, was convicted of aggravated robbery and first-degree murder for killing 43-year-old real estate agent Johnny Allen, whom she went home with after he picked her up for sex at a Sonic Drive-In in Nashville. Fearing that Allen was reaching for a gun, she claimed she took a revolver from her handbag and killed him.

She then escaped with Allen’s firearms and cash. She drove off in his pickup vehicle. Brown, who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the homicide, was freed from prison in 2019 after serving 15 years. Author of “No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us,” Rachel Louise Snyder, a New York Times contributing opinion writer, described the justice system’s history of betraying Black women and girls like Kizer.

“In this world, Black girls, especially, are routinely over-sexualized by law enforcement and the judiciary,” she wrote. “The lead investigator in the case against Volar wrote of one of Valor’s victims that she was ‘prostituting herself out.’ He was writing about a 15-year-old.” Snyder noted that Kizer was trying, “in the best way she knew, to help her family.” “She posted the ad on backpage.com so she could buy food and school supplies,” Snyder determined. “Kizer didn’t know that under federal law, it is illegal to solicit someone under the age of 18 for prostitution. What she did know were the layers of systemic racism embedded into her life – poverty, homelessness, abuse, hunger.”

After the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling, Snyder noted that Kizer had a choice. She said the disillusioned Black girl could go to trial and risk getting a life sentence — “her life for his, if you didn’t count how he’d already hijacked hers — or take a plea deal and some lesser time to serve. She faced up to 30 years on the plea. But 30 years wasn’t life, at least.” She took the plea, Snyder continued.

“She could have risked a trial, of course. But consider what the world had taught her by then, a poor Black girl with men’s violence and control all around her, with a law-enforcement system that prioritized her abuser’s freedom at the cost of her trauma, a world that said sometimes you were hungry and sometimes you needed school supplies, but no good comes from wanting,” Snyder concluded. “For six years her case was in and out of court, all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and what did that get her? An impossible gamble. What were the odds she’d prevail; in this world we’ve made for her?”

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Poll Shows Support for Policies That Help Families Afford Child Care

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — New national polling shows persistent voter concern about the affordability and availability of child care for working parents, alongside broad support across key demographic groups for federal child care policies that help families afford care.

Published

3 days ago

March 2, 2026

Oakland Post

By First Five Years Fund

New national polling shows persistent voter concern about the affordability and availability of child care for working parents, alongside broad support across key demographic groups for federal child care policies that help families afford care.

The national survey was conducted by UpOne Insight on behalf of the First Five Years Fund from January 13–18, 2026.

Key findings include:

• Parents need help: 80% of voters say the ability of working parents to find and afford child care is either in a state of crisis or a major problem.

• This is an affordability issue: 82% believe federal child care funding will help lower costs for working families — including 69% of Republicans, 84% of Independents, and 94% of Democrats.

• And there continues to be strong support (62%) for the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), a federal program that makes it possible for hundreds of thousands of families to afford safe, quality care for their children while parents work or go to school, including a majority of Republicans, 63% of Independents and 72% of Democrats.

• Support for funding child care programs remains strong: 75% believe child care funding should be increased or kept at current levels — including 75% of Republicans, 85% of Independents, and 97% of Democrats.

• 74% say funding for child care is an important and good use of tax dollars, including a majority of Republicans, three-quarters of Independents, and nine in ten Democrats.

FFYF Executive Director Sarah Rittling said, “Voters across the country are sending a clear message: federal child care and early learning programs work. These investments help parents stay in the workforce, strengthen families, and support healthy child development. They have also long had strong bipartisan support in Congress. At a time when affordability is top of mind for families, continued federal funding is essential to ensure child care remains accessible and within reach.”

First Five Years Fund works to protect, prioritize, and build bipartisan support for quality child care and early learning programs at the federal level. Reliable, affordable, and high-quality early learning and child care can be transformative, not only enhancing a child’s prospects for a brighter future but also bolstering working parents and fostering economic stability nationwide.

We work with Congress and the Administration to identify federal solutions that work for families with young children, as well as states and communities. We work with policymakers to identify ways to increase access to affordable, high-quality child care and early learning programs for children. And we collaborate with advocacy groups to help align best practices with the best possible policies. http://www.ffyf.org

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Trump’s MAGA Allies are Creating Executive Order Plan to Steal the 2026 Midterms

NNPA NEWSWIRE — The document that could lead to an executive order proposes using the claim that China interfered with the 2020 elections as grounds to “declare a national emergency.” The move would be an unprecedented step that would grant Trump new authority over the voting systems in the U.S.

Published

6 days ago

February 27, 2026

Oakland Post

By Lauren Victoria Burke, NNPA Newswire Correspondent

A group of MAGA pro-Trump activists, who say they are working in coordination with the White House, are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that would claim without evidence that China interfered with the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential to President Joe Biden by over 7 million votes. Since Trump lost to Biden in 2020, he has repeatedly claimed that the election was “stolen” without evidence. The report of a group of “Trump allies” preparing an executive order to give Trump power over elections was first reported by The Washington Post.

The lies around the right-wing campaign that pushed falsehoods that the 2020 election was stolen was trafficked through right-wing media, particularly Fox News. Fox News was then sued for defamation for the claims by Dominion Voting Systems. Fox lost the case and had to settle for the largest defamation amount on record of $787.5 million in April 2023.

The document that could lead to an executive order proposes using the claim that China interfered with the 2020 elections as grounds to “declare a national emergency.” The move would be an unprecedented step that would grant Trump new authority over the voting systems in the U.S.

The story in The Washington Post arrives as Trump increasingly signals that he may take actions that would alter the result of the 2026 midterms. The Republicans are widely expected to lose as their approval ratings plummet as a result of a failing economy under Trump. Over 50 members of Congress have announced they will retire this year and not return in 2027.

The Trump Department of Justice, which now has a large image of Trump on the side of it, “sued five new states Thursday [Feb. 26, 2026] demanding access to their unredacted voter rolls — escalating a campaign that has been rejected by multiple federal courts and faces resistance from Republican-led states as well,” according to Democracy Docket, a group that works to protect voting rights.

Trump claimed back in late 2020, the last year of his first term, that he had the authority to issue an executive order related to mail-in voting for the 2020 elections — which he would then lose. But the Constitution states that control of elections lies with the states. As the GOP works to place hurdles in front of voting, Democrats worked to make voting easier.

In March 2021, President Biden signed an executive order calling on federal agencies to expand voting access as part of the Biden Administration’s effort “to promote and defend the right to vote for all Americans who are legally entitled to participate in elections.”

Trump’s focus is clearly on altering the November 2026 midterm elections. Trump’s polling numbers and the elections and special elections that have taken place around the U.S. over the last year clearly indicate that Republicans are about to be hit by a blue wave of Democratic victories.

Lauren Victoria Burke is an independent investigative journalist and the founder of Black Virginia News. She is a political analyst who appears on #RolandMartinUnfiltered and hosts the show LAUREN LIVE on YouTube @LaurenVictoriaBurke. She can be contacted at LBurke007@gmail.com and on twitter at @LVBurke

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PRESS ROOM: NBA Hall of Fame Nominee Terry Cummings Joins 100 Black Men of DeKalb County to Launch Victory & Values Initiative

NNPA NEWSWIRE — NBA Hall of Fame nominee and Basketball Legend Terry Cummings was administered the official member’s oath and ceremonially pinned during a special induction ceremony held on Friday, February 20th.

Published

6 days ago

February 27, 2026

admin

Cummings becomes an honorary member, joining other role model sports stars

NBA Hall of Fame nominee and Basketball Legend Terry Cummings has officially become an honorary member of the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County, marking a powerful new chapter for the 100 Black Men and youth development across the region.

Cummings was administered the official member’s oath and ceremonially pinned during a special induction ceremony held on Friday, February 20th. The moment signified more than membership — it marked the launch of the organization’s transformative new platform, the Victory & Values Initiative.

The Victory & Values Initiative is a groundbreaking youth development program designed to empower elementary and middle school students through a dynamic blend of sports, mentorship, and STEM exposure. The initiative focuses on building health, discipline, character, leadership, and access to opportunity — creating pathways for long-term academic and personal success.

“This is about more than sports,” said Cummings during the ceremony. “It’s about using the platform of athletics to teach life lessons, create access, and build the next generation of leaders.”

The induction ceremony also featured notable guests including NASCAR’s newest Star Driver, Lavar Scott and NASCAR Director of Athletic Performance, Phil Horton, who joined Cummings for a powerful Victory & Values Town Hall discussion. The Town Hall was moderated by renowned Sports Emcee John Hollins and focused on leadership, resilience, discipline, and the importance of mentorship in shaping young lives.

A “Day at NASCAR” for 75+ Youth

Cummings wasted no time getting to work. On his first full day as an honorary member, he joined his new brothers of the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County to host a “Day at NASCAR,” escorting more than 75 youth to a once-in-a-lifetime experience at EchoPark Motor Speedway (formerly Atlanta Motor Speedway).

The youth participants received behind-the-scenes access including: an exclusive tour of Pit Row, access to the Garage Area and exploration of the interactive Fan Zone.

The experience culminated with a surprise meet-and-greet and Q&A session with NASCAR Superstar Bubba Wallace, who shared insights on perseverance, preparation, and breaking barriers in professional sports.

The day served as a living example of the ‘Victory & Values’ Initiative in action — exposing youth to new industries, expanding their vision for the future, and connecting them directly with high- level mentors and role models.

Building Leaders Through Access and Mentorship

The 100 Black Men of DeKalb County – a chapter of the largest, national mentoring organization in the county – continues to expand its footprint with programs focused on academic excellence, economic empowerment, leadership development, and health & wellness.

The launch of ‘Victory & Values’ represents a strategic expansion of the organization’s impact

intentionally integrating athletics and STEM to engage youth at an early age while reinforcing core principles such as integrity, accountability, teamwork, and perseverance.

“Our mission has always been to mentor the next generation,” said Vaughn Irons, President-Elect of the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County. “With Terry Cummings joining the brotherhood, along with partners in NASCAR and professional sports, we are creating unprecedented access and exposure for our youth. Victory & Values is about turning inspiration into structured opportunity.”

By connecting elementary and middle school students to professional athletes, executives, STEM professionals, and community leaders, the initiative aims to:

Increase youth exposure to careers in sports business, engineering, and performance science
Strengthen mentorship pipelines
Promote physical wellness and mental resilience
Build character-driven leadership at an early age

Open Invitation to Youth and Families

All youth are invited to participate in the Victory & Values Initiative, along with the other countless, impactful programs offered by the 100 Black Men of DeKalb County.

Parents and guardians seeking mentorship, leadership development, academic enrichment, and transformative exposure opportunities for their children are encouraged to connect with the organization.

As NBA Legend Terry Cummings’ induction demonstrates, Victory & Values is more than a program — it is a movement designed to build champions in life, not just in sports.

For more information about the Victory & Values Initiative or to enroll a student, contact: 100 Black Men of DeKalb County at Phone at 404.241.1338, info@100bmod.org or Tee Foxx at 404.791.6525,