Chrystul Kizer Got 11 Years in Prison for Killing Her Abuser. This Is Justice?

By Rachel Louise Snyder, New York Times

In 2018, a Black teenager named Chrystul Kizer shot and killed a 34-year-old white man named Randall Volar III, who had sexually abused and trafficked her starting when she was 16 years old; she was 17 at the time of the killing. This week, a Wisconsin judge sentenced her to 11 years in prison, with another five under supervision. Rather than serving justice, her case illustrates with searing clarity the sexism and racism that corrupt our criminal justice system.

In a 2019 investigation, The Washington Post detailed Ms. Kizer’s life: Her single mother, who struggled to support her four children. The abusive man and the family’s time in a homeless shelter. Ms. Kizer wanted money for snacks and school notebooks, so she placed an ad in an online forum called backpage.com, which was notorious for sex trafficking. (It has since been shut down.) Mr. Volar was the first one who answered. He showered her with gifts and took her to fancy dinners; she understood there was a price to these extravagances. But before long, she said he was taking her to hotels to have sex with other men. He’d wait outside for her and insist she turn the money over to him. He called himself an “escort trainer.” One night, when he wanted to have sex and she brushed him off, she said she fell to the ground and he jumped on top of her, trying to force off her clothes. She shot him twice in the head, and then, the police said, set his body on fire.

Ms. Kizer’s case has been in the national spotlight since she killed Mr. Volar; a petition to drop her charges garnered more than a million and a half signatures. In what was a major win for her side, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that she could argue that her crime was justified because she was trafficked by Mr. Volar — a groundbreaking ruling for trafficking victims. In order to make that argument, however, she would have to take her chances on a long, difficult, very public trial. Or she could take a plea deal.

Four months before his death, Mr. Volar had been arrested after another young girl called 911 claiming he’d drugged her and was threatening to kill her. The police searched his home and found hundreds of videos of sexual abuse. He had a penchant for Black girls, like Ms. Kizer: Hers was among those young faces found in the videos. Mr. Volar was released without bail the same day, pending an investigation. The police saw girls in the videos that looked as young as 12 and 13, and yet, “In many and most of the cases, we didn’t know the age,” the prosecutor Michael Graveley told The Post. “So we literally did not know whether we had misdemeanors or felony.”

In other words, the girls were young enough to appear young, but apparently not so young that they warranted priority.

Imagine a Black man, aged 34. Imagine him with videos of young white boys who appear to be 12, 13, 14 years old. Imagine those videos contained footage of grown men having sex with young boys. Imagine that 20 of those videos were shot by the suspect himself. Now tell me: In what world does law enforcement let such a person go free without bail? In what world do investigators hold on to those videos for months, seemingly baffled by the task of finding out the ages of the girls? In what world is the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony an excuse for this level of inaction?

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