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.

  • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
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    2 months ago

    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.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      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.

      • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
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        2 months ago

        So you’re down for authoritarian democracy.

        That’s a disingenuous misrepresentation of what I’ve said. You can do better.

        It’s absurd to argue that a jury should have the ability to make up the law based on the vibe of a given case. Courts have not operated in that manner since pre-history. It’s fair to say that civilisation itself is based on our collective ability to communicate and apply a reliable frame work of laws.

        our founders instituted juries the way they did

        Sure, juries determine whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty of the charges against them, that is quite literally how juries are instituted.

        To say they must convict on the most absurd of laws

        Juries do not “convict”, they find a defendant guilty or not guilty of the charges against them.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          You just described authoritarian or illiberal democracy and said you believe it’s 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.

          If what you say is true then we don’t need a jury at all. Just judges. After all why would we rely on random citizens when we could have a technical expert deciding if the law is applicable and was violated.

          • fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc
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            2 months ago

            Obviously, you need a jury of the accused peers to find them guilty so as to avoid corruption. The court may not criminally penalise someone unless a more or less random selection of the public agree that the person is guilty of the charges against them.