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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