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.
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.
You are talking about jury nullification.
The problem of there being no justice to seek for would be worse. And attractiveness of using legal systems is in them being actually useful for victims.