Judge to Defendant: You Can't Be 'Instrument of Reckoning''

A Wisconsin woman who killed a man accused of sexually trafficking her as a teenager was sentenced to 11 years Monday on a charge that could have sent her to prison for up to 30 years. Chrystul Kizer, 24, was 17 years old when she killed 34-year-old Randall Volar. He had been filming his sexual abuse of Kizer for more than a year, the Washington Post reports. Kizer, who said she shot Volar in self-defense after she refused to have sex with him and he pinned her down, pleaded guilty in May to reckless homicide.

• "The court is well aware of your circumstances surrounding your relationship with Mr. Volar," Kenosha County Judge David Wilk told Kizer, per the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "You are not permitted to be the instrument of his reckoning. To hold otherwise is to endorse a descent into lawlessness and chaos."

• Kizer was sentenced to an additional five years of of state supervision. The Post notes that she won't serve the full 11 years in prison because the judge gave her credit for more than a year and a half she spent in custody.
• At the hearing Monday, defense attorney Jennifer Bias said Kizer was first trafficked when she was 16. She said Volar trafficked Kizer to other men after paying her bail for a previous offense. The Journal Sentinel reports Volar was out on bail on charges of abusing girls as young as 12 when Kizer killed him in 2018. "We in no way ask the court to consider Mr. Volar to be blameless in this case," Kenosha County DA Michael Graveley said Monday.
• Kizer also burned Volar's house down and stole his BMW. Gravely argued that she acted not in self-defense but out of a desire for notoriety.

• Kizer had been charged with first-degree intentional homicide, arson, car theft, and being a felon in possession of a firearm, the AP reports. In 2022, Wisconsin's top court said she could argue during trial she was was protected by the state's affirmative defense law for victims of sex trafficking.
• If the case had gone to trial, Kizer could have faced a life sentence. The judge said Monday that she had "abandoned" the claim of absolution under the affirmative defense law when she pleaded guilty to the lesser charge, the Journal Sentinel reports. "You entered a guilty plea. That allows you to argue your circumstances warrant mercy, but not that they warrant absolution," he said.

(More Wisconsin stories.)